A Throne of Bayonets
by LVDB
Summary: In the year 2020, the world is still reeling from Third Impact. The three unfinished MP EVAs have been completed, and Shinji and Asuka have been called to Berlin to pilot once again. But the new regime isn't the only one interested in the children...
1. Chapter 1: Shinji

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Evangelion or any of the characters, and would be glad to remove this story if the owners/creators ask that I do so.

* * *

**Chapter 1: Shinji**

"Shinji!"

I looked up, and tried too late to appear like I'd been listening. Aoba wasn't convinced.

"Sorry," I said.

He frowned and rolled his eyes, drumming his fingers on his seat's plastic armrests. The group of BABYKA agents behind him watched us both with unveiled contempt. They were in their "official" uniforms—shaved heads, black boots, MP-5's and trenchcoats. Shigeru Aoba was more fidgety than I'd ever seen him. Of course, I hadn't seen him much before Third Impact.

My insides felt light and queasy, so I assumed we were still descending.

"Mr. Aoba?" I said.

"What?"

"I…I was distracted. I'm sorry. Are we close?"

He ran a hand through his long hair and sighed. "You see that?" he asked, pointing out the window. I followed his gesture to a cluster of faint lights winding along a river.

"Yes."

"That's Berlin."

I let my eyes lose focus and listened to the gentle drone of the plane's engine. We descended for another hour, during which time the sky changed from black to the cold, clammy gray that comes before the sunrise. An irrational part of me had expected Berlin to be more impressive than Boston; a quick look out the window dashed my hopes. Even from the air, it looked deserted and decayed. A place where humans had _once_ flourished, a long time ago.

"What's that green spot?" I asked.

"Eh? Probably the Tiergarten," he replied, not bothering to look up. "They converted it into a wheat field after the _Brunsbüttel _Meltdown irradiated most of the farmland up north."

"Oh."

I stared at the floor for a few more minutes. An orange glint appeared on the plane's wing as the sun began its ascent.

"Aoba?" I said again.

"What?"

"What should I say to a girl whose last interaction with me consisted of six months in a postapocalyptic warzone?"

He raised an eyebrow. "What about before that? If I remember correctly, you two were living together for about a year."

"I…failed her in every way possible. And I think the only reason she was interested in me in the first place was because I was a male EVA pilot who happened to live in the same house," I said.

"You're still going to be an EVA pilot," he reminded me.

"Only if the people who worked on the MP EVAs knew what they were doing," I said.

"In that case, start with 'hello'."

Another pause.

"Aoba, I'm going to have to kill human beings this time, aren't I?"

"You can count on it."

* * *

It was 5:00 AM, local time, when we finally exited the Berlin Tegel airport gates. Over three years had passed since Third Impact liquefied every airborne pilot on earth in mid-flight, and workmen were still cleaning up the wreckage of crashed planes that dotted the airfield. We pulled in to the only gate with power available.

And there she was.

"Good luck," Aoba said quietly.

It was odd seeing her three years older, but that was to be expected. She was smaller than I remembered too—my growth spurt had seen to that—but what was stranger was how much she _hadn't_ changed. The piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, fiery red hair…heck, she was still wearing her A-10 clips. Most unnerving of all was the way she held herself. The Asuka who had crawled out of the Sea of LCL had been a broken wreck. In the months that followed, I'd tried with limited success to coax her out again—when I wasn't trying to desperately humor our succession of warlord "hosts" or cowering under the sheets at night, afraid that I would be executed the next morning. Asuka, at least, was pretty. They would have used her as a concubine if the unfinished MP EVAs couldn't be completed. Me? I've never been useful except as a pilot.

But there she was again, hands on hips, eyes narrowed, somehow managing to look down on me despite the height disparity. It was as if she stepped off of _Over The Rainbow_ half a decade ago.

"Well, you've grown like a weed," she said.

"You're…um…" I fumbled.

"Yeah, yeah, I have a few more curves than I used to," she said, waving her hand distractedly. "So…"

She expected me to say something here. What?

"I see you're the same brilliant conversationalist as ever, Third. And don't apologize," she added, cutting me off. "You know that makes me sick."

That destroyed my only remaining conversational gambit. Fortunately, Aoba interrupted us before I mucked up the conversation any further.

"Shinji, you're now formally transferred to Berlin branch. Winthrop's assigned me to Berlin as long as you're here, so I'll be joining you two later. I have some business to take care of first."

He paused and cast a nervous glance at the two BABYKA agents approaching behind him. I was surprised to see Asuka shy away from them.

"These gentlemen will be escorting you to Asuka's apartment."

Asuka cocked an eyebrow.

"Excuse me?" she said. I recognized the tone from long, painful experience and braced myself for the inevitable tirade.

"Winthrop wants all his eggs in one basket," Aoba said. Behind him, the BABYKA men bristled at his informality, but said nothing.

Asuka froze the moment Aoba mentioned Winthrop's name. "The Secretary-General arranged this?" she asked softly.

"Yes."

Asuka looked back at me and nodded. "My mistake. I'll make do."

"Yes," Aoba said again. He nodded to both of us and turned on his heel toward his waiting escorts. "And watch out for _Segunda Ruta_," he called back before turning a corner.

I looked at Asuka questioningly.

"Rebel movement," she explained. "Last night, they poured gasoline on two government men and burned them to death."

"What kind of employees?" I asked. I could immediately tell from her expression that it was the wrong question. Her eyes subtly flicked to our escorts. I tried not to react.

"It's not important," she said. "Besides, doesn't Boston Branch have its own terrorists?"

"_Bukra_. 'Tomorrow'. They prefer bullets, though."

"Yeah…Well, now that we're both in Berlin, we're going to be pretty well protected."

"It would be inconvenient to lose the pilots before the test, wouldn't it?" I said, with more bitterness than was probably safe.

She looked at me curiously.

"Right," she said. Her voice had a strained edge, and I immediately dropped the subject.

She recovered quickly. "So I hear you're a philosopher now, Third," she said. A little smirk played across her face when she said it, but the nervous undercurrent was still there.

I laughed, rubbing the back of my neck. "I'm not exactly a philosopher, Asuka. They don't teach that stuff at the universities anymore."

"Aw, c'mon," she pressed. "I heard you were taking lessons with some former professor. Saved him from starvation with your pilot's income, even."

"Y—yeah…"

"Trust _you_ to resurrect the world's most useless field."

"Heh...yeah, I guess."

"_So?_" she demanded.

"Huh?"

She rolled her eyes. "So any brilliant insights into the meaning of life, Socrates?"

"Well, Third Impact made Philosophy of Mind a lot more interesting…"

Asuka stopped walking and glared at me. I immediately realized my mistake. In our terror-filled odyssey before Winthrop had seized the world's N-2 supply, we had one unbreakable rule: _Never_ talk about Third Impact.

"Err…sorry," I said. She gave a disgusted snort but said nothing else.

We walked in silence for a while. I mentally kicked myself the whole way. Five minutes into our reunion and I'd already done every possible thing wrong.

_At least you didn't masturbate over her comatose body this time_, a voice in my head muttered.

* * *

Asuka's apartment was only a couple minutes from the airport, inside the heavily fortified zone that most of the new government's buildings resided in. I'd spent most of my stay in Boston in a similar compound—far away from the gang-run ghettoes that housed the former inhabitants of two hundred nations after they'd randomly re-embodied. I looked out the window and noticed a familiar sight that reminded me of Boston. Graffiti was painted onto every available crevice of Berlin's crumbling architecture, written in every language imaginable—Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, English, and many I couldn't recognize. All of them said the same thing, though: _Where are you? I'm at such-and-such an address. Find me if you survived._

When I walked into Asuka's apartment, I was pleasantly surprised by its size. Berlin had none of the space problems that had once plagued Tokyo-3—especially after the post-Third Impact famines had wiped out half of the returnees. From the scent of pine and window cleaner, I guessed a maid came in every few days.

Yet for all its size and cleanliness, the apartment still seemed cramped. I noticed that Asuka's penchant for filling a room to the brim with her possessions hadn't dimmed since we'd lived with Misato—if anything, she was even more of a packrat than before. Overloaded shelves creaked under the weight of too many books, most of them old math and science texts. An extra closet on the far end of the room overflowed with brightly colored dresses that looked like they'd never been worn. In the living room, I could see electronics of all sorts literally stacked to the ceiling—boom boxes, televisions, and what looked like an old Nintendo system. The cupboards were jammed full of every type of dried food imaginable, with more piled on the counter. This last aspect was familiar to me; my own cupboards look the same way thanks to the months of post-Impact starvation.

Asuka looked back at me, spreading her arms.

"So, what do you think?" The question was loud and challenging.

"It's…nice. You have a lot of stuff here," I said.

"Yeah. It's a proper Western apartment, too—not one of those cramped Japanese dumps. It's even got locks on the doors. And two bathrooms, so I won't have to bathe in someone else's water."

"Great," I said, somewhat unconvincingly.

"You get the guest bedroom at the end of the hall. You still cook?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Good. Take a look through the cupboards and see what you can make us for breakfast. Since it's _my_ apartment, you might as well start making yourself useful."

I resisted the urge to point out that the host generally accommodates the guest, not the other way around.

"Sure, Asuka."

Ingredients were more limited than they used to be, although Asuka had some of the rarer delicacies—beef, oranges, and even a couple bananas. We didn't say much during breakfast. After she was finished, she mumbled something and wandered into the living room to play one of her game systems. I cleaned up the table, unzipped my bookbag, and flopped on the couch to read a book.

"Hey, Third!" she shouted.

"Yes?"

"I hear you do judo these days."

"Yeah. They wanted me to do hand-to-hand training to prepare for the Eva," I said.

"Same here. Wanna have a match?"

"Here?!" I asked incredulously.

"Of course not _here_, you idiot! The security section has a training room just a couple blocks from here," she said, walking into the living room again.

"Are you sure we're allowed to?" I said.

"Ugh. You're such a prissy little rule-follower. _Yes_, Third Child, it's allowed…Or are you just trying to avoid the inevitable beatdown I'm gonna give you?" she asked with a smirk.

I was still a little anxious, but I smiled. "I'll come with you."

"Good."

* * *

It was still early in the morning when we arrived, and the training room was empty. I heard the _chunk-chunk_ of Asuka turning the lights on, and soon the antiseptic glow of fluorescent lights bathed the room.

"We've got extra judogis in the locker room," she said, jerking her hand toward a door at the far end of the room. "Hurry up."

I slipped out of my shoes and jogged across the red foam mat to the door. It took me a couple minutes to find a clean gi—I could only imagine Asuka's reaction if I showed up smelling like moldy socks. I was down to my underwear when she poked her head in the door, fully dressed. In a red gi, no less.

"Hey Third Child, hurry u—hmmm…still kind of on the skinny side, aren'tcha?"

"Gah!" I shouted, ducking behind a locker. She rolled her eyes and closed the door.

Two minutes and a near heart attack later, I bowed and walked onto the mat. She stood in the center of the room, arms crossed, tapping her foot impatiently.

"This isn't a formal class, you know," she said.

"Eh?"

"That bowing crap. Let's get started already." She gripped my left lapel and gave me a slight jerk to signal that she was beginning the match.

For the second time today, I wondered what evil god had decreed that Shinji Ikari must be placed into one no-win situation after another. My first social interaction with Asuka since we parted in Boston was going to consist of trying to gently dump her onto the mat while avoiding the humiliation of getting thrown myself. Oh, and did I mention she was a _lot_ more skilled than I was? Her right leg swung back and forth like a pendulum, alternately trying to sweep my left leg out from under me and catch my right thigh to launch me forward. I briefly considered letting her throw me and get it over with, but two things stopped me. First, I remembered that if Asuka had detested one thing about me, it was my willingness to act like a doormat. She wasn't an idiot—if I lay down for her, she'd realize it.

And the second? It was something I'd tried to bury years ago when it dragged me screaming and sobbing into the Sea of Dirac--pride.

"Your style suits you," she said, trying a footsweep.

"It does?"

"Yeah. Defensive and pedantically technical like you're terrified of making a mistake. You've got to be the most boring judoka I've ev—Eep!"

I pivoted around, sank my weight, and trapped her right foot against my own as I yanked on her sleeve, following her down as we went. It seemed like a gentle fall, but I was still a little worried.

"You okay?" I asked.

She shot me a sour look.

"It's judo, Third Child, not a hatchet fight. I'm fine"

"Okay. Sorry, I just wanted to…"

"Save it," she snapped. "And anyway, it wasn't clean enough to score an ippon."

I nodded and started to press my advantage, moving her leg aside (and avoiding a triangle choke in the process) as I passed her guard and sidled into a pin. I'd secured her right arm and was starting to slide my own right around her neck when I froze.

_I was sitting on top of Asuka on the shore of the Sea of LCL, my hands around her throat. She even caressed my cheek, thanking me for ending it all for her. "Finally," she seemed to say, "you have the guts to do __something__ right." I collapsed on top of her, sobbing._

"_How disgusting."_

I shook my head and noticed the older, very real Asuka on the mat under me was frozen as well. I guessed from her strained expression that she was thinking about the same thing.

"Uh…Asuka…" I began shakily. Her face suddenly twisted into a snarl as she grabbed me tightly around the waist and bucked her hips, levering me across her body and onto my back. She scrambled onto my chest and secured a cross-lapel choke, leaning forward across my face as she twisted her forearms into the sides of my neck. My eyes felt like they were ready to pop out of their sockets. Already, my head was beginning to swim. I tapped her shoulder to signal surrender.

Nothing happened. I tapped again, with the same result. She _must_ have felt it! I kept tapping and started flailing, panic starting to rise in my stomach. And then…

The next thing I remember was lying face up on the mat, staring at the white stucco ceiling and listening to the dull hum of the fluorescent lights. I turned my head and saw Asuka sitting next to me, staring intently.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"You should have tapped out earlier, idiot."

The remark stung all the more because I'd expected it. I looked back at her.

"I _did_ tap out. You kept on choking anyway, Asuka."

"You're imagining things," she said. Then she stood up, slowly and stiffly, and walked across floor to the women's locker room. After taking a minute or two to steady myself, I got up to change as well. As I put my clothes back on, I heard the loud metallic _bang_ of a foot colliding with a gym locker. I sighed and fumbled with my pants, just in case Asuka chose to barge in again. This time, I doubted she would.

That's when I noticed the note in my pocket. It was written on expensive offwhite stationery, the kind that I didn't even think they made anymore. Someone had hand-drawn golden vines and flowers skirting the paper's edges. On it was written a simple message:

"Shinji,

Where do you think your father is?

--A Friend"

I must have stared at the note for two minutes, reading and rereading it with increasing confusion. Was it some sort of trick? Confidence men who promised to find loved ones were all too common after Third Impact. But no; this had been slipped into my pocket in the last few days. No con artist was stupid enough to target a teenager under BABYKA's protection.

I flushed it down the toilet, hoping that the MAGI-operated city plumbing wasn't part of BABYKA's intelligence gathering system.


	2. Chapter 2: Asuka

**Chapter 2: Asuka**

"So what's it like living with him again?" That's what the female government employees would ask me, over and over again. They did it with those fake 'interested' looks, as if Third Impact hadn't already shown me how phony their smiles were before they even flashed them. It never ceases to amaze me that human society continued working after everyone had seen the hypocrisy around them for what it was. I'd seen them stealing glances at Shinji when his back was turned. Not that it mattered, since their newest romantic interest spent most of his time with his eyes glued to the ground.

Idiots, all of them. I'd tried--once--to explain that the Great, Invincible Shinji had all the social skills of a lobotomized cupcake. No luck. It would have been interesting to see their reaction if I'd told them what he'd _really_ been like during the war against the Angels. Not that they'd have believed me.

At the moment, I'd been given the task of escorting the unwitting object of their affections around the base. NERV Germany was smaller than the awesome Tokyo-3 Geofront had been, but it was still easy to get lost in its endless hallways. I toyed with the idea of abandoning Shinji there before I remembered that he still had to make me dinner.

"So this is the bridge," I said, opening the door and standing aside so he could see. One or two of the techies looked up from their stations to spare us disinterested glances; the rest ignored us. "Most of the MAGI's control of the city is routed through here, and…_Ach! Guten Morgen_, Colonel Jinnai!"

The well-groomed, black haired man in the commander's seat nodded toward us and smiled slightly. Shinji froze with that deer-in-the-headlights look that he got whenever he met new people. I groaned inwardly and elbowed him in the ribs.

"Ow! Er…Nice to meet you, Colonel Jinnai," he said, rubbing his side and waving feebly.

Jinnai's smile widened. He stood up and walked toward Shinji, hand outstretched.

"Shinji Ikari! I've been wanting to meet you for a long time. So you're the great warrior who helped defeat the Angels…"

I noted with disgust that Shinji was already beaming and preparing to make a show of false modesty.

"…even if things didn't work out entirely as we'd hoped." Jinnai finished. He smiled apologetically. Shinji's shoulders slumped like an old punching bag. His hand was limp when Jinnai shook it.

"Still, there was nothing you could do about _that_…and _none _of us would have been around to complain without your efforts. The world owes you a great debt, Mr. Ikari. Now, if you young people will excuse me…"

Shinji was still standing there. "He means it's time to leave, _dummkopf_," I muttered. Fortunately, Shinji stopped zoning out before I had to drag him.

"Yeah. Sorry…"

_Typical_, I thought. _Two minutes after being introduced and he's already the Colonel's new favorite._

"One moment, Miss Sohryu," Jinnai said, motioning me to approach his seat. Shinji watched me from the door, looking slightly puzzled. Jinnai leaned forward over his seat's armrest, signaling that he wanted our talk to be private. I brought my head down, close to his.

"Are you going to be all right, Asuka?"

The question surprised me. The note of concern in his voice belied the businesslike phrasing of the question.

"Umm…yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"

"I'm aware you have a…past…with the Third Child. The reactivation tests are going to begin in a few days, and we can't afford any complications," he said.

I looked back and saw Shinji shifting from one foot to the other, looking at the floor.

"Don't worry," I said. "There won't be."

And with that, I marched Shinji out of the room.

"He seems nice," Shinji said after we had turned a corner. "Who is he, exactly?"

_The man who kept me sane for the last two years_, I thought.

"_Scheiße_, Third Child, didn't you do _any_ research before coming here?" I said. "That's our new Operations Director. He's a _big_ improvement on Misato."

He shot me an angry look. _Oho! So he's still worked up about Misato, is he?_

I grinned nastily.

"He speaks six languages fluently, and his English is even better than his Japanese. Before Impact, he ran a major corporation. They say he's the only Japanese in the military with a rank above lieutenant. Wanna know why?"

"Because Winthrop's short on senior managers and he speaks decent English?" he guessed.

"No, because he's everything Misato _wasn't_. Professional, efficient…" I paused for effect. "…Sober."

The sharp intake of breath told me I'd scored another point. He didn't talk to me for the rest of the morning. The tactic would have been a lot more effective if it wasn't his standard operating procedure anyway.

At least _this _time, the silence meant he wasn't ignoring me.

* * *

We got home late in the evening. Shinji retreated into his room for a while, so I decided to play some video games in the living room. It was a quiet night, already getting dark, and I figured an hour or two of killing aliens would be just the ticket. Besides, what else was there to do? I started hooking the speakers up when I heard cello music coming from the living room. I walked to the door, but once I got there I found myself standing still, not able to turn the knob and go in.

_You must be kidding_, I thought. _The day I'm scared to confront Shinji Ikari is the day I should cash my chips in_. The thought brought up an ugly memory, so I suppressed it. I exhaled slowly and opened the door.

My first surprise was that all the lights were off. After my eyes adjusted, I saw Shinji sitting on the porch, staring into the night sky. The music intensified, which I guessed meant that the piece was about to end. I remembered it—the prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No.1. He'd been playing it on the night of our first and only kiss. I wasn't an expert in classical music back then, and I'm still not. A girl from our class who played the violin had identified it for me when I hummed it for her a few days later.

I flicked the light switch on, and Shinji's head jerked up in surprise.

"You're wasting my electricity privileges, Third," I said. It came out sounding harsher than I'd intended it, and I briefly considered adding a smile before dismissing the idea as a little too pathetic. I'd just have to brazen it out.

"I kind of like the darkness," he said softly.

"Yeah, figures you would," I replied.

Instead of the cringe I'd been expecting, he gave me a sad little smile. "Yeah…"

This wasn't going quite as expected.

"So…I'm guessing from your cello playing that you still haven't found anybody to tell you to stop?" I said. I grinned a little to show him it was a joke.

"Huh? Oh…yeah, heh. I guess not." He drummed his fingers on the cello and then broke eye contact again, leaning back to stare at the sky. I realized he was focusing on the thin red ring of souls floating in their extraterrestrial limbo.

"The only cellist in the world who still gives a shit about classical music…or cellos," I said. "The girls in Boston must have been lining up for you."

"Not really."

"Lemme guess…the Invincible Third Child hasn't worked up the nerve to kiss anybody since me and Misato?"

His face was expressionless, and he continued looking up at the sky. Slowly, he nodded.

I snorted. "Figures. Don't tell me you're holding out for _me_."

His brow tightened a little. "Don't worry, Asuka. I know that ship sailed a long time ago."

"Hey, no problem. The world's still full of girls in hospital beds."

I hadn't meant to say it. I really hadn't. It was one of those stupid, ugly things that always seemed to come out of my mouth when I was around him. He flinched as if he'd been struck, and his body slowly curled in on itself as his gaze sank back to the floor. His hands clenched and unclenched as if he was trying to squeeze a stress ball that wasn't there.

"Well, it isn't as if you're missing much," I said, trying to salvage the conversation. "Sometimes I think you made the right decision, avoiding people. Dating isn't worth the breakups. When they desert you…" I trailed off when I realized I should shut up now.

Shinji persisted, though. He looked up at me again, wide-eyed. "How could someone break up with—I mean, um…you broke up with someone?"

"Nice try at subtlety, Third. No, _he_ broke up with _me_. Fortunately, he was a little better at softening the blow than you would have been. 'It's nothing personal' and all that shit. I guess I wasn't interesting enough, or maybe—" I stopped and glared at him. "…Wait, why the fuck am I telling you all this?"

"Sorry," he said.

"Did _you_ break up with me?"

"No, but…"

"So you're apologizing out of _pity_?"

He suddenly looked very nervous.

"No, Asuka! I just…"

"Then don't apologize!" I snapped.

"Okay." He barely stopped himself in time from adding "sorry". I wasn't quite sure whether to appreciate the gesture or crack him over the head.

I sat down a couple feet away from him and closed my eyes, feeling the warm night air on my face. Not that there's much cold weather anymore, thanks to the cumulative effects of Second and Third Impacts. The white, illuminated forms of little insects floated around the porch light. I pulled my dress down a little further and wrapped it tightly around my legs.

"If you're going to sit out here for a while, you'd better turn the lights off or you're going to attract bugs to my house," I said.

He seemed to perk up a little.

"I'll take care of it," he said. A few seconds later, the light flicked off again. I resisted the urge to huddle up and forced myself to relax.

"You're a real barrel of laughs, you know that?" I said at last.

"What do you mean?"

I sat up and stared at him. "Before I met you, I didn't think it was _possible _for a human being to brood this much. Seriously, Third, what's your problem?"

"Doesn't it bother you a little that we're going to be using the EVAs to kill people?" he asked.

"Does it—huh?! What are you talking about?"

"The three MP EVAs they've just finished. We're going to use them in a real war this time, Asuka."

"Yeah, so what?"

"I don't want to kill people." His tone was tinged with disbelief, as if he couldn't imagine what was wrong with me for not getting it. It needled me enough that I briefly considered bringing Kaworu up—not to mention the fact that Third Impact had started on his say-so.

Instead, I gritted my teeth and counted to ten.

"So what _should_ we do, Shinji? Leave the countryside to the warlords? Use our N-2 supply instead? Get who knows how many people killed using conventional forces just because one selfish little boy doesn't want to get into the Evangelion again?!"

"Thanks, Asuka" he said. I was caught completely off guard. It was his tone of voice that surprised me—his gratitude was entirely genuine.

"What the fuck for?"

"For calling me Shinji."

"Oh, yeah. Um…you're welcome."

Another long pause followed.

"Shin—" I stopped myself just in time. Using the name twice would seem like a concession. "Um…you wanna go shopping tomorrow? You didn't bring much along with you, and you should start getting some stuff for your room now that you're going to be living there for a while."

"I brought everything with me."

"See, that's your problem. You need to learn to live a little. I bet you've got ninety percent of your pilot's salary lying in the bank somewhere, don't you?"

He laughed sheepishly and nodded.

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Well, no time like the present to start spending it," I said. I slid the glass door open and stepped through. "You'd better get to bed soon. We're going to have to start early. Most shops don't stay open past seven these days."

* * *

The next morning, it took us twenty minutes to get ready to go and two hours for our car to shove through the whirlpool of pedestrian humanity that constituted Berlin's new population. If I'd cared, I would have caught snatches of Hindi, Arabic, Russian, English, and who knows what else. I _didn't_ care, though.

In the old days—the early, nightmare days after Third Impact—Berlin had been a deathtrap. It was one of the only two MAGI-run cities that hadn't fallen victim to nearby nuclear meltdowns or the megatsumanis--courtesy of Rei's giant head--that had scoured NERV China and Tokyo-2 off the map.

They tell me that people flooded in from the countryside at first. Then they figured out that their only source of livelihood was scrounging the city for the few "luxuries" that the looters hadn't destroyed—radios, refrigerators, generators—to sell to the new class of agricultural ethnic warlords sprouting up in the countryside. Without any real government, the city's gang leaders came to the awkward conclusion that they had to keep everybody alive or their neighborhood tribute would dry up. And if _that_ happened, they could say goodbye to the food supply from their more powerful country cousins.

Gang rule had lasted until one of those warlords managed to get his hands on the UN's supply of N-2 warheads. Game, set, match. Now the tribute was flowing from the countryside to the city again, and with it came hordes of the unemployed and desperate.

We were waiting in one of the city's only cars as a dirty flood of people and pack animals crossed the street. It royally pissed me off, but Shinji didn't seem to notice—he sat transfixed, staring out the window.

"What?" I asked.

He pointed to a man lying on a wagon wheel attached to the top of a pole, like a flower and its stem. The man's face and lips were cracked and red from the blazing post-Impact sun, and his limbs were threaded between the spokes, clearly broken.

"Oh, yeah. They do that here."

He continued to stare.

"The guy was probably a subversive or a terrorist or something," I added, this time in Japanese. I hoped he would take the hint.

He looked at me with a combination of disbelief and horror that momentarily shamed me into silence. But only momentarily.

"Look, Shinji," I growled. "You know as well as I do what BABYKA does. Don't tell me you didn't see this shit in Boston."

"They bury them alive there," he said quietly.

"Well, there you are then."

He just looked down for a while, not saying anything. I prayed none of the guards spoke Japanese.

The market was even more crowded and louder than usual, and I was thankful when our escorts shoved open a path for us--not that anyone needs much shoving when a BABYKA agent tells them to move. Most of the crowd limited themselves to stealing curious glances at us once in a while. They probably wondered what a couple teenagers were doing with bodyguards from the secret police.

_You'll know soon enough._ _Just wait till you see my EVA dance in the Zoologischer Garten_, I thought, and smiled to myself

I inspected a few of the market stalls before settling on one with reasonably fresh-looking fruit. The man flashed me a servile grin. _Good, _I thought._ Too intimidated to haggle._ I pointed to an apple.

"How much?"

He gibbered something incomprehensible. He must have caught my frown, because he waved his hands and started speaking faster, at a higher pitch.

"Ya, sayyid, kem yekelef?"

I followed the man's grateful stare to the last person I would have expected that sentence to come from.

"Doolarain," the man replied.

"Shokran," Shinji said, handing him two dollars. The man beamed, and Shinji nodded and accepted the fruit.

"You're full of surprises these days, Third," I said as we walked away.

"It's not that impressive," he said, rubbing the back of his head again. "You knew three languages when you were thirteen."

"I didn't say I was impressed, just surprised. And I knew them by the time I was eight."

He looked at me open-mouthed. I noted with pleasure that I'd regained the initiative.

"That's incredible, Asuka. I bet if you studied for a few months—"

I held a hand up to cut him off.

"The only language that matters anymore is English, Shinji. Pilots need to talk to the common people for only two reasons: to buy food or tell them they've missed a spot on the carpet."

"The common people include Germans and Japanese these days, Asuka," he said.

_Let the topic drop, Third,_ I pleaded silently.

"I know," I said. I cast a brief look at our escorts to make sure they were too far away to hear us.

"I just don't think it's fair—"

"Who cares about _fair_?" I hissed. "Do you remember what it was like when we re-embodied? _Do you_? If Winthrop wasn't holding everybody in check, how long d'you think it would take before they started ripping each other to pieces again?"

One of the agents looked at Shinji suspiciously. Behind him, a poster of Brett Winthrop smiled benignly down at us. Six or seven smaller pictures of the Wardens were arranged in a circle around him, like planets revolving around a sun. I recognized the Chinese, German, and Russian Wardens; the rest I couldn't identify. Across the bottom "The Restorer of Human Political Unity" was written in eight languages.

Shinji, dense as ever, didn't stop talking.

"Yeah, I guess you're right. You know, Asuka, sometimes I think we made a mistake after Third Impact…"

The agent was walking toward us. _Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!_

"…What if we'd all agreed on what our society should be like _before_ we re-embodied? I mean, before we knew who would be running what?"

He was a couple feet away now.

"Everybody would have—"

"You want to go to the mall?" I asked quickly.

"Wait, there's a mall?" Shinji said.

"Yeah." I suppressed the urge to sigh with relief. "One of the Secretary-General's pet monopolies. I hear they're going to be opening a branch in Boston pretty soon."

Before Shinji could start talking again, I turned to our escort and smiled as sweetly as I could. "Any chance you could drive us to the mall, sir?"

"Isn't the mall a little public for political talk?" he replied. I felt my veins freeze. He'd just spoken in perfect Japanese. Shinji stood riveted in place, eyes wide and rigid as a board.

Then the agent's head exploded, drenching both of us in blood and brains. His companions wheeled around as gunfire erupted from the windows of half a dozen dilapidated buildings. Another BABYKA man went down, and I saw the bright trail of an RPG as it lanced into the car we'd left a few minutes earlier. The explosion was deafening.

Shinji was still standing there. I grabbed him and yanked him away from the scene.

"Run, idiot!" I yelled. He probably couldn't hear me, but when he caught my eye he nodded and started running.

I took a glance behind us and saw a man in a ski mask methodically pouring gasoline over a fallen agent's body. The BABYKA man was wounded but still alive, and he choked and whimpered when the gas flowed over his head.

I turned away and kept running. A figure suddenly darted out of the shadows and tackled Shinji. Before I could move to do anything, another man grabbed me. I tried to close with him to kick his legs out from under him, and I screamed as I felt my body launched head over heels into the concrete. The stench of chloroform flooded into my nostrils and my hearing began to go.

* * *

We woke up in a rubble-filled room. From the debris, I guessed we were in a disused part of the city. It was almost black, so it was probably some kind of basement. There were men whispering in the next room, but they were quiet enough that I could hear water dripping and the occasional scampering insect. The smell of moonshine and filth told me that the place had been used recently by some of the city's all too numerous homeless.

"Shinji?!"

"Right here," he said. "Who are these people, Asuka?"

"I'm guessing _Segunda Ruta_ from the way they barbecued the BABYKA guy back there."

"So we're…?"

"Dead. Yes."

The door at the far end of the room opened and a man with a ski mask walked in carrying a dim electric lamp. It revealed a row of chairs that I hadn't noticed before. A crowd of men followed him, all wearing masks. One by one, they sat down.

The pause seemed to last forever. Beside me, I could hear Shinji clenching and unclenching his fists again. For a crazy moment, I imagined him chanting his _mustn't run away_ mantra in his head before I realized that there was nowhere to run anyway.

"Good evening, Miss Sohryu."

"Just get it over with," I said.

"We have a proposition for you," he continued. "You could be very useful to us if you cooperate."

"Fuck off. You ain't got nothing on Winthrop's boys if they found out I was collaborating."

Another man stood up and pulled his mask off. "Shinji, did you get my note?"

Shinji's head jerked up the second he heard the voice.

"Aoba?"

Aoba? _Shigeru_ Aoba? The techie from the plane?

"You know where my father is?" Shinji asked.

_What the fuck was going on?_

"You might say that," another man said. He was a little shorter than the rest and, incongruously, he was wearing a formal blue suit and tie with his ski mask. He, too, pulled his mask off and tossed it with a dramatic flourish that I was too stunned to notice.

"Jinnai?" I gasped.

He grinned and leaned against the wall. Despite the confident smile, I noticed that Jinnai was more fidgety than I'd ever seen him, stepping from one foot to another and threading his fingers in and out. He no longer possessed the air of calm authority that had always reminded me of Kaji.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, so I did.

"You?! You're the terrorist leader?"

It must not have been the answer he was expecting, since he gave me a surprised look that lasted for a few seconds. Then he surprised me in turn by breaking into nervous laughter. I'd never heard him laugh before, and it sounded odd to my ears--a little too high pitched. I'd always expected him to have a deep, warm sort of laugh. If anything, it made the scene even more surreal.

"Sorry," he said. "You have no idea how long I've waited for this conversation. In any event, Miss Sohryu, you've got it all wrong. I'm not leading terrorists. I'm leading a coup."


	3. Chapter 3: Shinji

**Chapter 3: Shinji**

"You're kidding, right?" Asuka said. She had calmed down visibly after Jinnai had removed his mask. Her voice carried a greater note of authority now. I, on the other hand, was still terrified.

Jinnai leaned against the wall and smirked—an expression I wouldn't have expected from the kindly bridge officer I'd met earlier that morning.

"Yes, Miss Sohryu. In fact, this is all an elaborate practical joke. Gotcha."

He'd probably calculated that the humor would put us at ease, and to some degree it did. It wasn't particularly funny, but it seemed like a gesture of goodwill—people usually don't wittily banter with their victims. At least, my father hadn't.

"You'll never get away with it. You're planning to seize the Berlin MAGI, right?" she said.

Jinnai nodded, but his smirk didn't recede.

"But that's insane!" Asuka shouted. Her hands were balled into fists at her sides as she planted her feet on the ground and leaned forward, looking for all the world like an angry schoolgirl. I realized that she'd never had anyone to tell her how absurd it looked. For a moment, I wondered how many of my own childhood tics had escaped my notice due to my lack of peers.

"Why is it insane?" Jinnai asked. His voice was smooth and patient, like a teacher waiting for a particularly quarrelsome child to burn herself out before correcting her.

"You wouldn't last five minutes! Even if you _somehow_ manage to get unrestricted access to the bridge, and by some _miracle_ you fight off base security long enough to lock the place down…"

"Go on, Miss Sohryu."

"Winthrop's got a hundred thousand troops! Two regiments of Executive Guards! A parachute regiment, for crying out loud! They'd be on your ass faster than Misato on an unopened beer can. How long d'you think the control room doors could stop heavy artillery?

Jinnai nodded appreciatively, as if to say _well, you're not an idiot after all_.

"A good summary, Miss Sohryu. However, you omitted Riot Unit 5 and the militias."

"You think the _militias_ would help you?" she asked incredulously. "They answer to their ethnic block wardens, who answer to Winthrop. And Riot Unit 5 is the English-speaking arm of the police department, for fuck's sake!"

"Of course. I note them only to make you aware of our adversary's assets—"

"—Although no police department has ever intervened to _stop_ a coup," Aoba interrupted.

"There's always a first time," Jinnai said, holding up a hand and motioning for Aoba to sit down.

I'd decided as soon as the conversation began that it would be useless to argue with Jinnai—he'd obviously been planning this for a while, and if he was half the salesman he seemed to be, he'd already considered every possible objection before we could think of it. There was nothing left to do but listen. Asuka had apparently come to the same conclusion.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked. There seemed to be a note of genuine curiosity in her voice.

Jinnai's smirk broadened into a grin.

"Of the hundred thousand men in the main UN army, only a small fraction is available in the capital. Most of them are occupied with holding down resource-rich areas or fighting rebels. In fact, Berlin is lightly defended."

"Define 'lightly'," Asuka said.

"Winthrop's worried about a coup coming from the regular army, so he keeps only a skeleton force in the city itself. The air force is negligible—eleven thousand men, but most of them are busy resupplying our troops overseas or providing air support. Besides, most of them would rely on the MAGI to coordinate their landing in Berlin. The entire garrison consists of an understrength training division and an infantry brigade, plus the Executive Guard you so cleverly pointed out. As for the militias, they won't stick their necks out. They're useful for basic community policing, nothing more."

"And what about the CPR?"

"What about them? The Colonial Parachute Regiment is three hundred miles away and dependent on air transport. They'll never make it in time."

Something seemed to click in Asuka's mind.

"You've recruited technicians from their unit, haven't you?" she asked.

Jinnai chuckled. It sounded very different from the high pitched howl of laughter I'd heard from him earlier. "A magician doesn't reveal all of his secrets, Miss Sohryu. I will only say that there are more ways to neutralize a unit than simply destroying them."

My own curiosity got the better of me, and I worked up the nerve to speak.

"What about the regular people?" I asked.

Both heads swiveled around and stared at me as if I'd just asked for directions to Atlantis.

"What, you mean civilians?" Jinnai asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah…You'd call them the common people, I guess," I said.

Jinnai looked questioningly at Asuka. She shook her head and rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

"The common people will do what their Wardens tell them to, Shinji," she said.

"Oh…"

I stayed quiet for a while and traced the wet, dirty cracks in the concrete walls with my eyes. In the meantime, Jinnai and Asuka argued about logistical details. Asuka worried that a single loyal unit in the wrong place could throw everything out of whack. Jinnai countered that some of the training regiment and most of base security had already been subverted. Asuka brought up the security services, which Jinnai dismissed with a convoluted explanation involving 'noise' in intelligence gathering. A bureaucracy was a machine, he said. It had a certain set of preset responses, and a cunning opponent could take advantage of them. To my surprise, Asuka conceded the point and moved on.

Then Jinnai said something that sent a sickening jolt through my stomach.

"…Of course, none of that will matter once you and Shinji wipe them out with your EVAs."

He said it with unnerving carelessness, as if a thousand lives here or there were really nothing to worry about. Asuka merely bobbed her head once in agreement and moved on to other details.

"So they won't believe that it's a coup at first?" she asked.

"Of course not," Jinnai replied. "It could be anything from terrorism to a guerrilla attack. And even if they _do_ find out, for all they know it might be coming from Winthrop's inner circle or even—what is it now, Shinji? Speak up."

"Colonel Jinnai, why are _you_ doing this?" I asked softly.

"Eh?"

"Why do you want to overthrow the Secretary-General?"

He frowned and straightened his tie, then leaned back again. He wasn't quite as relaxed this time, though. In the shadowy lamplight, his sharp features made him look like a nervous weasel.

"Isn't it obvious, Ikari?"

I shook my head.

"Understand that we are doing this with great reluctance," he said with a theatrical sigh. "Aside from me, none of the individuals you see here holds a rank above lieutenant, despite being far better qualified than the men who hold those posts right now. Before Third Impact, most of us had UN careers of one kind or another."

He turned to Asuka now, his eyes boring into hers.

"In those days, Miss Sohryu, being affiliated with the UN and NERV _meant_ something. Before Third Impact allowed Winthrop's clowns to take over, the armed forces had the respect of the population. They weren't a bunch of underpaid gunmen licking a dictator's boots."

Asuka's attention was now riveted on Jinnai.

"I think it's time we erased the stain on our honor from Third Impact. Don't you, Miss Sohryu?"

She flinched when he said it, and at that moment I realized just how well he'd been playing on her insecurities. I found myself becoming angry, an emotional luxury I'd tried to avoid since Third Impact. It would have been understandable—even justified—if Jinnai had been manipulating me like this. After all, Third Impact had been my fault. I was the selfish little bastard who wiped out the human race in a pathetic cry for attention. Asuka had died trying to stop it.

I asked a question I already knew the answer to, trying to make it sound as innocent as possible. True to form, I didn't have the guts to challenge him directly.

"You were in NERV, Colonel Jinnai?"

It caught him off guard.

"Er, no…not exactly. But my company did a lot of business with them before Third Impact…"

Asuka's eyes narrowed. When she spoke again, she did so in a clipped, icy tone.

"Colonel Jinnai, I can't agree to help you because I don't think that your plan is feasible," she said. "There are too many unplanned factors that could screw it up. If you want to kill us now, go ahead…but I don't think a government investigation into our deaths would be healthy for you or anybody else in this room."

She straightened up again, rigid as a guardsman, and faced Jinnai with poise that I found incredible under the circumstances. Jinnai was unfazed. If anything, his expression seemed to have grim humor in it.

"I was afraid of that. Ikari, Sohryu, there's something you need to see."

He beckoned one of the guards over, and the man snapped a laptop open. The computer fan started whirring almost immediately in the basement's heat. It beeped twice as it booted up—an everyday sound that seemed wildly out of place in that milieu. As the computer started, another man set up a collapsible table for it in the center of the room and Jinnai stared at the screen like a businessman reviewing a powerpoint presentation.

"Skip to 12:44," he ordered. A flurry of mouse clicks followed, and he swiveled the screen toward us.

The footage looked like something filmed on a 90's home movie camera, complete with a little white date and time indicator at the bottom right corner. The camera seemed to be sitting at the front of a small, windowless courtroom. A balding, greasy-haired man in long robes that I assumed was the judge sat with his back to the camera, with a group of uniformed men sitting on either side of him. A shabbily dressed man stood in the center of the room with his hands held over his legs. Somebody turned on umbrella shaped lights in the back of the room that looked like the ones our school photographer had used. The man's face became clearer.

"Father," I whispered.

The camera zoomed in clumsily and I realized that there was something wrong with him. His ragged clothes and thin, starved appearance weren't a surprise—I'd seen more than my share of that after Third Impact. What scared me was the way my father held himself. He looked down at the floor, his hands crossed protectively at his waist. At first, I thought he was in handcuffs. Then I noticed that he seemed to be holding up his pants. My father's hunched shoulders made his jacket look three sizes too large for him.

"Get your hands out of your pants, pig!" the judge snapped. The camera's recording system made him sound like he'd screamed into a cheap computer microphone.

My father said something that I couldn't make out.

"What's he saying?" the judge demanded. The men on either side of him shrugged. "Speak up, Ikari!"

"I said the guards took my belt away from me. They were worried I would…injure myself."

"A pity. And you will address this court as 'your honor', Ikari."

"Yes, your honor."

"And don't think for a minute that I believe your excuses. I've dealt with perverts before. The interrogators tell me that you had a fourteen year old girl in your care before Third Impact." He turned to the soldier sitting to his right. "MacPherson, what was her name again?"

The man shuffled through a stack of papers. "Rei Ayanami, your honor."

The judge flashed a yellow smile before turning his back to the camera again.

"You were thinking about Ayanami just now, weren't you, pig? That's why you had your hands in your pants, wasn't it? Speak up!"

"No, your honor," he replied tonelessly.

The badgering went on for several minutes, with the judge screaming abuse and my father meekly accepting it. At last, my father was allowed to read a prepared statement.

"Item one: That, in collusion with SEELE, I knowingly tried to bring about the extermination of the human race. Item two: that I ordered numerous murders in pursuance of that goal, including but not limited to Ryoji Kaji, Kimihiro Sato, Gregory Wilson, Pyotr Virchis…"

His voice faltered for a moment as he read the next name.

"…Yui Ikari, Donald Branaugh, Johann Brandt…"

I shuddered and tried to suppress the urge to vomit.

"You're probably wondering why Commander Ikari isn't the calm, collected man you remember him being," Jinnai said from behind me.

I shook my head. It was obvious what they had been doing to my father.

"I was there," he said. "Winthrop ordered most of his senior commanders to attend—I can only assume he wanted to intimidate us. BABYKA found your father near Berlin, a year ago. He re-embodied shortly after he realized that Yui hadn't been part of Instrumentality, but it took him a while to get here. He was looking for you."

I kept staring at the screen. My father was still reading his list of names.

"Actually, this is only one of the show trials we found on the MAGI," Jinnai said. "There are others, you know. Former politicians, military commanders, industrialists…"

"Stop it!" Asuka screamed. "Turn the fucking thing off and leave him alone!"

Jinnai nodded to the computer operator, and the image paused.

"There's more film you need to see," he said.

"What more could he _possibly_ need to see? You want him to watch his father's execution?"

"I said film _you_ need to see, Miss Sohryu."

Her eyes widened. _Please, no_, I thought. _No, no, no, no…_

"Skip to 56:70," Jinnai said.

Another defendant stood before the court, a woman I recognized from the visions that had danced through my head during Instrumentality.

Asuka tried to scream, but it was strangled into a soft whimper as it left her throat.

"Mama…"

"Kyoko Zeppelin Sohryu, I understand you have a confession to make," the judge said. The woman looked back at him pleadingly, tears filling her eyes.

"Please, just let me see my—"

"Do you have a confession or don't you? If not…"

"_Please_!" She threw herself on the ground and crawled toward the podium. "Let me see my baby again! I need to see my baby! Where's Asuka? Kill me, do whatever you want, but _please_ just—"

"Remove her," the judge said, motioning to the guards. They tried to pry her off the floor.

"No! No, I need to—ugh! Uurk!"

They kicked her until she stood up.

Asuka grabbed the computer and hurled it against the wall, then flung herself at Jinnai. I grabbed her, trying to stop her before the guards decided to. She turned back to me. I can remember only one other occasion when she looked at me with that much hatred in her eyes.

"Get off me, you filthy little son of a bitch!" she screamed. "You're working with them, aren't you Shinji? You've been with Aoba for years, planning this! It's fake! FAKE! You're all trying to manipulate me! It won't work, you hear me?! It won't work!"

She sank her teeth into my arm. My hold loosened, and if she'd been in more control of herself, she probably could have pushed me off. Fortunately, two men rushed over and gently secured her before she made a serious mistake.

"It's real," Aoba said. "As I understand it, part of your mother's soul was stored in the Evangelion. After you failed to save her from the MP EVAs, she was absorbed during Instrumentality along with the rest of the recently dead."

Asuka stopped struggling.

"Is she…still alive?" she asked. I could see a flicker of hope in her eyes.

Aoba shook his head grimly.

"When BABYKA located her, Winthrop was elated. He thought that he could use her to finish the MP series. Unfortunately, only the nurturing part of her soul was left in the EVA…"

Asuka's heavy breathing began to transform into sobs as the message sank in.

"She's gone," Jinnai said. Look, Miss Sohryu: I don't need you. If need be, we'll kill you both and proceed using improvised dummy plugs. But I think you need us."

She didn't say anything, and Jinnai motioned to the guards to let her go. She slumped to her knees, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

"How many people would get killed in this operation?" I asked.

Jinnai beamed. He tried to hide it, but there was no mistaking the air of exultant victory.

"Very few. We'll be concentrating overwhelming firepower at a few crucial points. Soldiers generally aren't stupid enough to get killed in a political squabble. They'll surrender, Mr. Ikari,"

"What about the government officials?"

"Kept in isolation until the coup is completed. They won't be able to do anything once we have the EVAs, the N-2s, and the MAGI."

"I…I don't know," I said. "I'll do whatever Asuka wants, when she recovers."

"When you _both_ recover," he said. He gave me a reassuring smile that I'd seen too many times from Ritsuko and Misato to believe it was genuine. He thought he'd already won. I nodded anyway, since what he'd said was true.

"We'll arrange to drop you off near the site of the attack. I doubt BABYKA will suspect what's actually going on. If you decide to join us, you're only going to get as much information as we feel you need to know, and you won't be permitted to send messages back to us. All communication will be one way," he said.

"Colonel Jinnai?" I said.

"What?"

"How do you know you don't have informants in your group?"

He stopped and considered his answer before speaking.

"They have an idea that _something_'s up, but they're not going to move until they have more information."

"How do you know?" I pressed.

"I'm never wrong, Ikari."

Somehow, I didn't find the answer reassuring.

* * *

Less than an hour after our recovery, I found myself in a BABYKA interrogation chamber. It was a small, badly ventilated room with hot yellow lights. The place smelled like sweat and refuse. Bizarrely, the walls were covered in chipped pink tiles and the floor was painted in bright, cheerful yellow. It would have looked like part of an elementary school if it wasn't for the bloodstains.

The interrogator they'd assigned to me wasn't what I expected. He was a slightly built man, no more than a hundred thirty pounds. Instead of the customary BABYKA shaved head, he wore a long, sloppy mop of black hair. Strangest of all, he looked Asian and spoke Japanese smoothly and easily.

"Are you familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, Mr. Ikari?" he asked.

"What? Er, no, I don't think so."

He looked at me skeptically. "Aren't you supposed to be a philosophy student or something? It says so in your profile."

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know."

"Don't worry about it. It's more of an economics concept anyway."

I guessed he was going to elaborate, so I stayed silent.

"Tell you what: I'll give you a rundown. Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that you and Asuka were involved in some sort of scheme against the state."

It took every ounce of my limited willpower to avoid a guilty start. I tried to swallow and realized that my mouth was dry.

"You're in this room, and she's in the room across the hall. So guess what we'll do?"

I'd read somewhere that liars were supposed to be afraid to look their accusers in the eyes. As I shook my head, I tried to keep my gaze locked on his.

"I don't know, sir."

He chuckled and took a long drag on his cigarette.

"It's surprisingly simple, Ikari. We just tell each of you that whoever squeals first gets off scot-free, as long as the other guy doesn't blab as well. Then we wait for fear and self-interest to do their work."

"I don't think Asuka would betray me, sir."

"Betray you? Why? Do you have anything to hide?" he asked sharply.

"I—ah—in the scenario…I mean, the situation you just gave me…if we were...um…" I stumbled with the words and began to realize that I was probably dead.

He acted as if nothing had happened.

"Ah, I see what you mean. You're trying to say that some criminals—you and Asuka, for instance—have loyalty to one another. You might have arranged ahead of time not to blab, eh?"

I racked my brain for an innocent-sounding answer. There wasn't one, so I just nodded. He mock-seriously waggled a finger at me.

"You're not thinking your options through, Ikari. Even if we can't get you on the bigger charge, we can still lock you both up for a while. So you have a choice. On one hand, you can stay quiet and hope your partner does the same. Then the best you'll get is a long prison term. On the _other_ hand, you can blab and get a chance to walk away a free man."

"But if she makes the same choice, we're both dead!" I said.

"Very good, Ikari. You catch on quickly. But you can't control her choice. No matter what she chooses, you're better off confessing."

Every second I spent clinging to the fiction that this was a hypothetical scenario postponed my trip to the torture chambers. I tried to keep him talking.

"What's the solution?" I asked.

"There isn't one."

For a second, I felt my muscles tighten in the opening stages of a panic attack.

"That's why it's lucky you're not suspects," he added. He must have read my puzzled look, since he continued.

"You know, BABYKA was furious when your escorts got killed. They don't have many police interrogators who speak fluent Japanese. Care to guess who their last Japanese-speaking interrogator was?"

"My...my escort?" I asked.

"Funny how the universe works, isn't it? Jinnai assigned me as a substitute."

His eye twitched in an almost imperceptible wink, and a surge of hope passed through me.

"Now then…how many men attacked you?"

_What answer does he want?_ I wondered.

"Well, there were a lot of them…" I said.

He bit his lip, which could have been a sign to stop or go on. _Should I say there were only a few?_

"Not that many, actually."

He jerked back and shot me a look of disbelief.

"Not many? Then how did they kill your escorts?"

_Wrong answer!_

"Er…I guess I didn't mean it that way. It's just that there weren't as many as I was expecting," I said.

"You weren't _expecting_ any of them, Mr. Ikari," he said. Nervousness and frustration were beginning to seep into his voice.

"No, of course not! I didn't mean it like that. I…um…what I meant to say was that you'd think it would take more men to beat our escorts. We—they—the BABYKA agents were pretty heavily armed, I think."

"So…?" he prompted.

"What?"

He gritted his teeth and stole a glance at the one-way mirror.

"_How many attackers were there?_"

"Um, I don't know. Twenty?" I guessed.

He inhaled sharply, but scribbled my answer down.

"And they were _Segunda Ruta_ members?" he said.

"Yes. They were Spanish."

"Spanish?"

"Um…they spoke it, I mean. I guess they were Mexican, or Central American. _Segunda Ruta_'s a Central American group, I thought. Isn't it?"

He rubbed his forehead and gave me a look of equal parts exasperation and terror. This was very, very bad.

The interrogation continued for another hour. I stumbled into one unintended trap after another, enough to mark me as a fool or a traitor several times over. When I finally left the interrogation room, I was shaking. I saw my interrogator's hands as he lit a cigarette and realized that I wasn't the only one. As I stepped out of the room, a rough hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. A huge, seemingly neckless BABYKA agent sneered down at me.

"You don't fool me," he said. "If they got Charlie, there's no way you would have survived it."

I tried to stammer in my broken English that I didn't speak his language very well. His grip on my shoulder tightened and I fell silent.

"We'll find out what happened," he said.

My heart was still hammering when I arrived home. Asuka stared dully back at me from the kitchen table but didn't say anything. It was an empty, hopeless look. What if she'd wilted during the interrogation? What if she'd let something slip?

I hurried to my room, huddled into a corner, and turned on my SDAT. It didn't help.

That was our second day back together.

* * *

We didn't talk again for a long time. In the mornings, I would make breakfast and Asuka would shuffle out of her room to pick it up. Without a word, she would carry it to her room and shut the door quietly behind her. By the fifth day, I began wondering whether we would run out of clean plates, but I didn't want to go into her room unless she asked me to. I remembered what had happened the last time I tried to force an emotional issue with her.

Sometimes, I sat in front of her door and listened to the sound of fake explosions and gunshots from her video games. She must have known that I was listening there, since she once paused the game and stayed silent until I got up and left. Other than occasional glimpses of Asuka, my life now consisted of listening to my SDAT and living with the certain knowledge that BABYKA would be coming for us. I spent my evenings rehearsing in my head what I could say to convince them that Asuka had nothing to do with the coup.

During one of these sessions, I was distracted by the unfamiliar sound of splashing water. At first, the sound's significance didn't register with me. Then I realized what was odd about it: Asuka didn't take baths anymore.

I hurried to the bathroom door and knocked. _How long had it been before I'd noticed?_

"Asuka?"

The splashing continued, along with what sounded like gagging.

"Asuka! Are you all right?" I yelled. I began pounding on the door. The ragged, choking coughs continued.

"Asuka!"

I ran at the door and slammed into it, sending a wave of pain shooting through my shoulder. The door didn't budge. I ignored the pain and tried again, smashing my now bruised shoulder into the wood. Nothing happened, and the sounds from inside were getting faint.

_Please don't let it end like this_, I thought. _Please…_

I kicked the door just above the knob. The latch loosened, but didn't snap. Then, in desperation, I did something that I should have tried a long time ago: I grabbed the knob and turned it.

The door opened, and I rushed into the room. Asuka was lying naked in the bathtub, face up, flailing her arms and gagging from the water in her lungs. I struggled to pull her out and winced when one of her fingers poked me in the eye.

Her face was turning blue. I pumped my hands on her chest, trying to get her to cough the water up. After some hesitation, I put my mouth to hers and blew air into her lungs. She jerked up and down and started spitting bathwater up. I didn't know what to do next, so I sat there and waited for her to finish. She turned over onto her stomach and kept coughing. While she lay there, I rooted through the drawers and took all the razors and other sharp objects out.

_My third kiss_, I thought bitterly. The coughing finally died down.

"Asuka, are you okay?" I asked.

She lifted her head off the floor and looked at me like a cornered animal. Her arms snaked around her body, covering it as best she could.

"Get out of here!"

The response took me by surprise.

"I want to make sure you're okay," I said.

She began shaking and glared at me through newly forming tears. Her jaw clenched as she saw the razors in my hand. When she spoke, her voice took on a soft, dangerous tone.

"Get out, Third."

"How do I know you won't just—"

She grabbed a shampoo bottle and threw it at me. It struck me on the side of the head.

"GET OUT!" she shrieked.

I obeyed, shutting the door behind me so she could get dressed. When it opened again, she passed me without a word and headed for her room.

"Asuka, I think we should—"

The door slammed in my face.

I thought about opening the door and then wondered if it even mattered. We were both dead anyway—for all I knew, the arrest warrants were already signed. And even if I did go in, I would only make it worse. How could I even relate to her, let alone comfort her?

_Oh, yes. That line of reasoning worked __so__ well with Misato._

I opened the door. Asuka was sitting on the floor, an open laptop lying on her legs.

"Lemme guess: you want to _talk_."

"I think we should," I said.

She gave me a twisted, angry smile.

"Okay, Third. Let's talk about _you_."

"I'm serious, Asuka."

"So am I!" she snapped. "During all our time together after Third Impact you wanted to ask me what I thought of you but you didn't have the guts. Well here's your chance, Shinji! Whaddya wanna know?"

"Asuka, I'm trying to help you talk about your problems. I don't think this is the time to—"

She jumped to her feet. "Bullshit! It's _always_ about you! See, I _know _why you're trying to help me now. It's the same reason you didn't have the nerve to kill me on the beach four years ago. You _need_ me to keep you company, like a tapeworm needs a host."

"That's not true!" I said.

"Of course it is! Your idea of 'talking' is sitting and pretending to listen until I feel good enough to pay attention to you again. I knew it the moment I saw that vapid naked fantasy of me in your mind during Instrumentality. Your own personal Asuka doll. Even better than having me in a coma, right Shinji?"

Her voice suddenly became high and girlish. "'Oh, become one with me Shinji! Let me hold you, Shinji! Let me comfort you and be your mommy and fulfill all your emotional needs whenever you feel like it!' That's all I ever meant to you!"

Stupidly, I tried to put a hand on her shoulder, hoping that it would calm her down. She slapped it away and shoved me backwards.

"Don't _touch_ me!" she growled. "Don't you _dare_ try to comfort me! You didn't even care enough to sortie when my mother was getting torn to bits by SEELE's Evas!"

"That's not fair!" I said, more loudly than I'd intended to. "My EVA was trapped in bakelite! It wouldn't move! You must have seen that during...I mean…"

"During Instrumentality? Oh yeah, I saw _everything_ during Instrumentality. Your entire pathetic life story. Every missed opportunity and orgy of self-pity you ever had. And you know something?"

I just stood there, too burned out to move. This was infinitely worse than what I'd expected. At last, I shook my head weakly.

A look of triumph appeared on Asuka's face. "At that moment I realized you were too screwed up to help _anybody_." She laughed humorlessly. "I even tried to help _you_. But you just stood there, hanging your head like a fucking zombie, and begged me to take care of you while the entire human race was getting destroyed."

"And you refused," I said. "The entire human race and it still wasn't enough."

She reeled as if I'd hit her.

"Oh, so it's _my_ fault? I think we both remember what happened _next_, don't we Shinji?" She pulled down on her shirt collar, revealing her neck. "Come on! You want to finish the job?"

"I…"

Her right hand shot out from her collar and slapped me. I stumbled backward, more from shock than from pain.

"Still haven't got the nerve, huh?" she taunted. "You know what? It doesn't matter. BABYKA'll take care of it soon enough anyway."

_BABYKA!_ I'd forgotten them! The apartment was bugged—they must have been listening to all of this. For all I knew, they had surveillance cameras as well. I held my fingers to my lips.

Asuka looked as if she was going to keep screaming, but suddenly stopped herself. Instead, she walked up to me and put her mouth by my ear.

"I'm going to die, one way or the other," she whispered. "And then, Shinji, you'll be all alone."

She patted my shoulder and walked out of the room, brushing against me as she passed. I must have stood there, shaking, for several minutes. _What should I do?_ I wondered.

If I stayed, she'd shout something incriminating and get us both killed. If I left, she would have unrestricted access to pills, knives, and who knows what else. Then again, maybe it was better to die quietly in her apartment than in BABYKA's torture chambers.

I put on a fresh shirt and walked to the front door. Two secret police escorts were waiting for me.

"That's it, Shinji. Run away again," Asuka called from the couch.

I didn't answer.

* * *

Berlin is a terrible place to take a walk, especially at night in the rain. I spoke enough English to learn from my escorts that I was expected to stay within the cordoned-off area around my apartment—a few blocks at most. The one saving grace was that the streets were empty. Even the pimps and beggars made themselves scarce at night. To do anything else was to violate curfew, a necessary evil in a world where the lack of electrical power made every night prowler a likely thief. Why else would you be walking around at ten PM?

I approached a circular garden I'd noticed two days ago during my car trip in. Some minor government official probably owned it, but there were no houses nearby and my escorts didn't complain. It was actually a pretty little place. Most of the flowers were semi-tropical, since few European species did well in the post-Impact heat. I closed my eyes, savored the rare cool of the nighttime, and listened to raindrops patter on a plot of broad-leafed plants that I assumed were begonias.

I sat down on a stone bench. Moisture sank into my shirt and the seat of my pants, but I was past caring. On a whim, I brought my feet onto the bench and lay down, letting the gentle sound of the rain lull me to sleep.

When I woke up again, the air had become colder and my escorts were gone. The fat raindrops I'd seen earlier had transformed into a light mist. Fog had begun to rise from the ground.

_What was going on?_

"Hello, Ikari."

I recognized the voice, and looked around wildly trying to find its source. It didn't take very long. An elfin figure with red eyes stepped out of the fog.

"Are you…real?" I asked.

Rei tilted her head to one side. "An odd question, pilot Ikari. If I was an illusion, I would hardly be an accurate source of information."

"I guess you're right."

We didn't say anything for a while. She waited patiently while I stared at her. She looked much younger than I remembered her, a fact which made me vaguely uncomfortable. Memories of Rei had always been tied in with the odd longing I'd always felt for her—I guess you'd call it romantic love, at least to the degree that I'm capable of such a thing. Without realizing it, the image of her that I carried in my mind had aged with me. Yet here she was, a fourteen year old schoolgirl standing in front of a nineteen year old young man.

"Help me, Rei," I said.

"I cannot."

"Why?" I asked.

"You have made your choice, Pilot Ikari. I cannot accept you back into the Ring of Souls. I am the gatekeeper of a door that can only open outward."

"Listen to me, Rei. Asuka and I are going to die. I don't know when. Soon, I think. I'm not asking you to accept us back, but…can't you do _anything?_ Please, Rei."

She gave me a sad little smile. "You are still with Sohyru, then."

I sighed. "No. She still hates me," I said.

"It is…curious," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"I have noticed that humans are often attracted to those who do not reciprocate their feelings."

I rested my head on my hands.

"Heh. The story of my life," I said.

"And mine," she replied.

It took me a second to process the statement, and when I did I wasn't quite sure what to say. She stood there patiently waiting for an answer as her school uniform dripped from the rain.

"Would you like to sit down?" I offered.

She gave me another of her sad, far-off smiles.

"I would…very much like to, Pilot Ikari."

We sat in silence for a while longer. She didn't seem to mind. Patience must be easy when you've spent the last four years swimming through the infinite memories of Instrumentality. To my surprise, she broke the silence.

"If you die, I will be able to harvest your soul again," she said.

"And Asuka's?" I asked.

Her head lowered slightly. "I…could also do the same for Pilot Sohryu, if she desired such a thing."

I remembered the feeling of violation I'd felt from Asuka when her mind was forcibly opened to three billion people.

"I don't think she would, actually."

"And would you?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Sometimes I think it would be better if I just let nature take its course."

Rei didn't reply at first. She looked at me with the expression she'd worn when I'd insulted my father years ago, right before she slapped me. Then her face softened.

"When it happens, I shall give you the choice to stay or go," she said.

I didn't want to press the issue, so I nodded.

"Thank you," I said.

"You are welcome. I…I will be waiting, Ikari," she said.

"Rei, I—"

I woke up again. Someone was standing over my body, shaking me. The rain was still coming down heavily. Apparently, the BABYKA agents were there after all.

"How long have I been out?" I asked in broken English. At first, he didn't understand. I repeated the question slowly.

"A minute or two," he said.

My mind was working at full capacity again, and a terrifying thought suddenly hit me. What if it hadn't been a dream at all? What if I was still in Instrumentality? For all I knew, the past four years could be false memories, like the ones I'd "remembered" during Instrumentality when Asuka was an old childhood friend and Rei was a goofy transfer student.

I shuddered and tried to push the possibility out of my mind.

* * *

The apartment was dark and quiet when I got back, and for a moment I worried that Asuka had already gone through with her plan to kill herself. I knelt by her door and listened until I could hear the sound of gentle breathing.

_For now,_ I thought.

I tiptoed to my room and shut the door. My desk lamp was still on, and its soft white light illuminated the new SDAT lying on my bed. Asuka had given it to me on my first night in Berlin; she'd said it was an old model she'd been trying to get rid of. I'd had the grace not to point out that a week-old price tag had still been attached. I carefully placed it in the dresser and lay down on the bed.

Third Impact must have run through my mind from start to finish a hundred times that night. I remembered the macabre white EVAs as they tore into Asuka's mother. I saw the huge, gangly form of Kaworu reaching out to me. I saw myself whining the five words that destroyed the human race.

_They can all just die_.

Everything that had happened after that—the separation of families, the famines, the nuclear meltdowns, the warlords, Winthrop's dictatorship—flowed from my choice. The nightmare world that was driving Asuka to suicide was the one I chose to create.

_And now, it's up to you do undo it_, I thought.

"You win, Jinnai," I said.

I fished through my desk for a piece of stationery and a pencil. One way or another, we would be coming under suspicion soon. I would give them their suspect.

_Dear Asuka,_

_You probably remember the day we got separated after the rocket attack. When you found me again, I told you that I'd managed to evade our attackers just as you did. I lied._

_They weren't Segunda Ruta at all. It was a coup, Asuka._

"Too melodramatic," I muttered. I started again.

_Dear Asuka,_

_I snuck this note into your dresser because I don't know how else to tell you. The Segunda Ruta attack was a front. The people who attacked us were planning a coup. Captain Jinnai, your commanding officer, was leading them. He wanted me to use the EVA to overthrow the government, and I accepted. If you're reading this now, we've probably failed. I'm sorry, Asuka. I knew you were always loyal to the government, and this must come as a huge shock. Please forgive me._

I debated for a moment whether I should erase Jinnai's name, but ultimately decided to leave it in. He was the one who brought us into this mess; let him swing for it if he failed. Now all I needed was some way to explain Asuka's depression and suicide attempts…and to stop any new ones after I was gone.

_P.S.: I know you've had a rough couple of days after the attack, with the memories it brings up of Third Impact and all. I hope you get through it OK. Please don't do anything to harm yourself._

_Sincerely,_

_Shinji "Baka" Ikari_

_Third Child_

When BABYKA chose to search our apartment, they'd find the note and decide that I'd been the only one involved. Hopefully, Asuka's handlers take the hint about Asuka harming herself and put her on suicide watch until she snapped out of it.

I folded the paper several times and crept over to Asuka's door. Her breathing pattern told me that she was still asleep, so I opened the door and crept in. It took me a minute to locate her desk, and I experienced a brief thrill of nervousness when I knocked over a box of paper clips and heard it clatter to the floor. Fortunately, Asuka seemed unaffected by the noise. Her face was still placid, and I was struck with how much she still looked like the girl who had accidentally crawled into my bed four years ago.

"At least one of us will live through this," I muttered.

I closed her door and retreated to my room for another night of troubled dreams.

* * *

I woke up at three AM to the sound of angry voices in the hallway. Then I heard the words I'd been dreading for days.

"We're taking the Third Child to NERV central."

I was surprised to find that the expected panic didn't come. I was scared, yes. Sick to my stomach. But what I felt most was resignation. I sat up in my bed and waited for the inevitable.

"Where's your authorization?" another voice demanded. "All I see is a bunch of scum-mouths." It must have been one of my escorts who had spoken; 'scum-mouth' was their special word for non-English speakers.

"Right here." Someone turned the television on and cranked the volume up. I couldn't make out what it was saying, but it sounded like a public service announcement of some sort.

"Shit! This is a—"

The man's voice was cut off as the room erupted in gunfire. I scrambled under the bed before I realized what I was doing. It turned out to be a good decision when a stream of bullets tore through my door a few seconds later. The noise was deafening, but short-lived. Unfortunately, my ears were ringing too hard to appreciate the silence that followed.

"Shinji?" a voice called. The door creaked open and a man in black leather shoes stepped into the room. I didn't answer him.

"Aren't you a little old to be hiding under the bed?"

"Aoba?" I gasped.

"In the flesh."

"Then…"

"Yeah," he said. "The coup's on."

I stared at him, open-mouthed, and then dashed into the living room. Splayed across the floor were the bodies of three BABYKA agents, leaking blood onto the carpet. One of them lay a short distance from my bedroom, a submachine gun still clutched in his hands. I guessed that he was the one who fired into my door. He must have had orders to kill me if there was a risk of capture. The TV was still droning on, but I could recognize the words now.

"…_This is not an announcement, but a vow. The previous government has trampled upon the sacred cultures of its subjects. It has systematically misused the public funds allotted to it. We, the leaders of the April 2__nd__ Revolution, are now entrusted with the future of humanity—a future we intend to restore. All existing treaties agreed upon by the previous government will be honored. All government posts, with the exception of BABYKA's command structure, will be retained by their current occupants. The secret police will be disbanded…_"

Aoba grabbed my arm roughly.

"Get moving, Shinji! The training division left an hour ago!"

"What?" I yelped. "This has been going on for an hour?"

He dragged me out of the room and down the hallway, so fast that I almost tripped over another corpse.

"Calm down," he said. "Every unit left its staging point at a different time so that they'd arrive simultaneously at their targets. It denies the opposition warning time."

"What?!"

"Just shut up and trust me," he said.

We ran down the stairs and into a waiting car. When I hesitated, Aoba shoved me inside and slammed the door.

"I'll meet you at the base," he said.

The car started moving, and I suddenly realized something.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Where's Asuka?"


	4. Chapter 4: Asuka

**Chapter 4: Asuka**

I lay on a couch bleeding my guts out. The bandages weren't helping much, and the ministrations of my would-be nurses were prodding and clumsy. I gritted my teeth and stared at the body of a BABYKA agent sprawled across the floor. The fucker was still holding the gun he'd shot me with. I guess Winthrop hadn't wanted to take any chances.

Jinnai was shouting into the phone in the hallway.

"—What?! Ignore the press, you idiot! We need those radio stations knocked off…Eh? I don't care if there are nineteen of them! Get them all!"

The wound didn't hurt as much as it probably should have. In my time, I've been decapitated, burned with acid, roasted, disemboweled, and eaten alive while my EVA was at over 100% synchronization. After a while, you learn to take the pain in stride.

Then again, I hadn't been bleeding my own blood during those times. It was nice to think that after so many dress rehearsals for it, my real death might end up comparatively painless.

"Asuka, I'm talking to you!" Jinnai snapped.

"What is it?" I rubbed my forehead, hoping the wooziness would go away.

"Where—does—Shinji—stand?"

"What? Oh…He'll join you," I said.

"How can you be sure?" he asked.

"He came into my room tonight and snuck a letter into my desk that said he was joining you and that I had nothing to do with it."

Jinnai's expression changed into a mixture of shock and disgust.

"Is he actually stupid enough to think that _that_ would get you off the hook?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

_Plus, it gave him a way to commit suicide and STILL be the hero,_ I thought.

"If his piloting skills are as pathetic as his people skills…"

"Piloting's probably the only thing _not_ pathetic about him," I said.

Jinnai was about to reply when one of his aides interrupted him. Apparently, the head of the railway union was on the line. For a few seconds, Jinnai's gaze swung hesitantly between the phone and me. Then…

"Get her out of here. I want her in the EVA within an hour. And pick up Ikari in case she's useless."

"I'm _not_ useless," I said.

Jinnai's face twisted into a snarl. He carefully placed his hand over the phone and pointed a finger at me. I noticed that his hand was shaking, but his voice was smooth, low, and angry.

"You're _worse_ than useless, Sohryu. Thanks to you, we've blown our cover and have to start the coup a week early with one wounded pilot and another who's probably too depressed to synchronize. That is, if BABYKA didn't kill him already after _you_ left him alone."

My unexpected surge of fear at this prospect made the pain much more intense. Another man interrupted us.

"Sir, they're trying to retake the Fernsehturm TV tower—"

"Then set the charges off!" Jinnai roared. "Do I have to do everything myself? And why is Sohryu still here?"

He motioned to the men around me to get moving, then took his hand off the phone to calmly reassure the railway boss that nothing was wrong. It took his attendants almost ten minutes to half-escort, half-drag me down the stairs and into the waiting car.

* * *

The drive to NERV Central was tense and painful. We drove at top speed through the empty streets, and the never-ending potholes jerked my body into the seatbelt every few seconds.

One of the drivers muttered something in Russian.

"What did you—" I began, before another dent in the road shut me up.

The man looked back, clearly terrified. I thought he was looking at me until I realized he was staring out the back window. He pointed behind us.

"Someone following," he said. His Japanese was so thickly accented that I could barely understand it.

I peered out the window.

"_Someone_? That's a fucking convoy! Are they part of the coup?"

He looked confused, so I tried again.

"Ours?"

"No. _Pyaati ОМОН_… Fifth _Palitsiya_…Police," he said

"Riot Unit Five?"

He nodded. His partner slammed his foot onto the accelerator.

"Shit!" I yelled, to no one in particular. "_Shitshitshitshitshit_—" I was suddenly pressed against the side door as the driver rapidly swerved. For a few sickening moments, we seemed dangerously close to tipping over. We didn't, but the view I got from the side window as we turned was almost as bad.

The entire street was illuminated with headlights. A column of cars was driving four-abreast thanks to the lack of traffic after dark, and I couldn't see the end of them. It would have looked impressive in the well-lit streets of pre-Impact Japan. In electricity-starved modern Berlin, it was awe-inspiring. They included everything from sports cars to minivans—uniformity was a luxury that post-Impact governments couldn't afford—but they were all painted in same ominous black.

However, there was something much, _much_ worse.

"They've got armored cars!" I shouted. I instantly recognized the squat, ugly turrets and jutting prows that looked like salamanders' heads. I'd seen them a year ago, when they'd crushed the Hauptbahnhof railway strike with machine guns. My warning was rendered irrelevant two seconds later when one of them opened up on us with its thirty millimeter autocannon.

The driver swerved again, and his partner rolled the window down. At first, I thought he was going to jump and make a run for it, but he leaned out instead and started firing. He managed to empty two pistol clips before somebody picked him off. We barely turned in time to avoid running the back wheels over the body.

I looked over the back of the seat again to see what was happening. A bullet shattered the window a moment later, and I crunched down as far as my seatbelt permitted.

"Get down!" the driver screamed, too late.

I took the next second or two to process what I'd seen before the glass shattered. I felt an icy lurch in my stomach.

"They're splitting up! They're trying to cut us off!"

We screeched around another corner. Our pursuers were getting closer now, although the armored cars couldn't get a clear shot at us. Small arms fire was another matter; one of our rear tires exploded after a bullet buried itself in the rubber. For a moment, the car became almost uncontrollable. It zigzagged back and forth along the street as the driver tried to stop it from spinning into the sidewalk or a building.

Then blinding white light flooded through the front windshield. The driver slammed on the breaks and began fumbling with the door handle as the car skidded to a halt.

"Get out!" he yelled. I crawled out of the door, the pain temporarily dulled by the rush of adrenaline. I got maybe a meter or two before rough hands grabbed me and dragged me toward a set of wooden barricades. The asphalt tore skin off of my legs and sandaled feet.

They unceremoniously dumped me on the ground twenty or thirty feet behind the barricades, face up. I took the opportunity to get a last look at the stars, and wondered for the first time in my life why I'd always preferred to see the night's sky drowned out by city lights.

"Asuka?" a voice asked.

My mood oscillated from resignation to panic.

"_Verfluchter Idiot_! You let yourself get captured! What the fuck's the matter with—"

Shinji held his hands up to his chest as if he was trying to ward off punches.

"No, it's not like that! Asuka, they're on _our_ side."

"Oh…"

"Let's hope they stay that way when the shooting stars," another voice interrupted. I turned my head to find the source of the sound and saw a long-haired man in an old NERV uniform sitting a few feet away from me. He smiled and tugged at his shirt.

"I figured if I was going to get killed, I might as well do it as a NERV officer," Aoba said.

"What do you mean 'when the shooting starts'?" I asked.

He pointed past the barricades. I noticed for the first time that the street was constricted on both sides by cross-parked cars and antitank traps, funneling any potential attackers into a narrow defile.

Convoys emerged from three different streets and converged on the narrow entry-point. The armored cars stood guard, cannons leveled, as the jumbled mass of cars tried to untangle itself enough to allow the riders to get out and take firing positions.

Aoba stood up and dusted his pants off.

"Showtime," he said.

He walked alone into the headlight-lit whiteness between the two forces with his hands behind his back. When he reached the midpoint, he stopped and stood in "at ease" position.

"He's insane," I said. "They're going to gun him down."

Even as I spoke, another man stepped into the light from the other side. He was odd-looking, with fluffy white hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken so many times that it had become flattened. I recognized him from the EVA planning meetings: Raymond Gordon, the commander of Riot Unit 5. He looked furious. Then again, he always looked that way.

"What the fuck is this?" he shouted at Aoba. "You and your men'd better clear out of NERV Central immediately and hand over the occupants of that car or I'll—"

Aoba held a piece of paper under the commander's nose. For a second, Gordon looked as if he was going to strike Aoba, but he thought better of it and snatched the paper instead.

"What the…?"

"Orders from the Secretary-General," Aoba explained. "Your unit should return to barracks and await further orders. There's some sort of political disturbance, and I'm supposed to keep NERV Central under quarantine until the crisis is over." He stood aside and subtly motioned to something behind us. Even with the glaring searchlights obscuring them, I could see the outlines of machine gun emplacements and anti-tank positions.

"What do you mean by 'disturbance'?" Gordon demanded.

"I don't think it's wise to speculate at this point, except to note that there might be something going on in the inner circle. But you didn't hear that from me," Aoba said.

Gordon seemed to weigh this carefully, biting his lip and looking Aoba up and down. Every few seconds, his eyes drifted to the heavy weapon emplacements.

"You can check with your MAGI access port if you don't believe me," Aoba said.

"That won't be necessary," Gordon replied. "Fucking politicians screwed up again."

Aoba grinned and nodded.

"We're staying here until we figure what's going on. There's no way we're returning to barracks under these circumstances."

Aoba's smile evaporated.

"Chief Gordon, I doubt that the Secretary-General would—"

"I'll explain it to Winthrop when I see him next. This meeting is finished," Gordon said. "Benny! Try to get the Executive Guards on the radio!"

Aoba swung around and started walking back quickly. As he passed us, he didn't even break stride as he seized our hands and started dragging us past the gun emplacements. I clung on to Shinji's shoulder to steady myself. Within seconds, we worked out one of our unspoken agreements: he wouldn't ask me if I needed help, and I wouldn't call attention to the fact that I was receiving it.

"Hurry up!" Aoba said. "This quiet isn't going to last for long."

"Asuka?" Shinji asked.

_Please, PLEASE don't ask me what I think you're going to_, I silently pleaded.

"What…what made you change…I mean…Asuka, why did you join the coup?"

_Scheiße_

I groped for an easy answer and found one.

"I need to avenge my mother. Even _you_ should understand that."

It sounded absurd when I put it like that, like some kind of Icelandic blood feud. Yet either because he sensed that I didn't want to talk about it or for some reason of his own, Shinji just smiled at me.

"I understand."

Gunfire erupted behind us.

"Sometimes I hate being right," Aoba muttered. "Hurry up!"

"Carry me," I said.

Shinji stopped walking and stared at me as if I'd announced I was the Queen of England.

"Just how petty do you think I am?" I shouted. "There's a difference between pride and a death wish. CARRY ME!"

Fortunately, he'd gotten a lot stronger in the four years since Third Impact. That, plus some help from Aoba and a German soldier whose name I never asked, allowed us to move pretty quickly.

I heard the police autocannons firing in the distance, booming in three-round bursts. Every few moments, they would be interrupted with an explosion, and the chorus would seem a little feebler.

"At least the RPGs are working," Aoba said.

He ran his ID card through the front door's reader. Nothing happened. A muffled mechanical voice spoke over Aoba's radio. He didn't seem to notice at first, and continued trying to snick the card through. The voice became louder, shriller and more insistent.

"Someone's on your radio," I said.

He swore and turned up the volume.

"What is it?"

"Second Executive Guards Regiment has just penetrated NERV Central," the voice said.

Aoba's face fell.

"Where's the First Regiment?"

"A train full of 'em derailed near Schönefeld. The rest'll arrive by road in a couple minutes."

"Open the door!" I screamed.

I suddenly realized that the autocannons weren't the only weapons going silent. Our own machine guns were firing less frequently as well—which could be a good sign or a very, very bad one.

The latch finally clicked open. We ran inside. After the chaos in the courtyard, the quiet was almost a relief—just the sound of heavy breathing and the clank of shoes running across a metal floor. Then Aoba's radio crackled again.

"Exec Guards three hundred meters to your right."

Aoba changed direction. I could feel Shinji and the other man carrying me beginning to tire. Shots rang out ahead of us, distressingly close.

"Turn left!" the voice ordered.

We did. Shinji was definitely slowing down now.

"Drop me," I said.

Nobody responded.

"Give me a fucking gun and drop me!"

When they still didn't say anything, I started struggling. If I was going to die, I refused to go out as a cripple who dragged her protectors with her. Shinji tightened his grip, which only made me struggle harder. He _would_ let go eventually, before the Executive Guards got him.

But what if he didn't?

I was only able to dwell on that uncomfortable thought for a moment. Then I noticed that the Guards already _had_ arrived.

"They're--" the voice began

"In the tunnel ahead of us," Aoba finished. "I see them."

The German soldier drew his weapon. A series of shots rang out, almost deafening in the narrow hallway. When I recovered from the pain in my ringing ears, the first thing I noticed was the young soldier's shredded body.

Aoba was no fool. He had already tossed his weapon aside. Shinji was unarmed and exhausted. And I…

… I was lying a few inches away from the dead soldier's pistol.

_Dodge this, Arschloch_…

At that point, several things happened. I reached for the pistol. Aoba threw himself on the floor, dragging Shinji along with him. The Guards opened fire.

All of this had been expected. What was unexpected was the stream of bakelite that flooded over the soldiers from nozzles in the ceiling. Within seconds, the sound of gunfire had been replaced with muffled screams and gargles as the bakelite began to congeal over mouths and noses. Where there had once been an open corridor, there was now a solid pink wall.

"Gotta love the MAGI's security system," Aoba said. He and Shinji hoisted me up again, and after another minute's sprinting we made it to the armored doors of the command center. It took another minute for the people inside to disengage the locks, but the area was now sealed behind several feet of bakelite and I wasn't particularly worried. I should have been.

* * *

Even before the doors shut again, Aoba leaped into action. He rounded on a harassed-looking young man sitting in the commander's seat.

"Deng, what's going on? What's the Executive Guard doing here? Only the Secretary-General and the Vice-Secretary have the authority to order them in. I thought we had both of them"

The other man licked his lips, trying to avoid Aoba's eyes.

"That's not technically true, sir. Winthrop's in our custody, but the Vice-Secretary…ah…"

"Spit it out!" Aoba said.

"He subverted the detail sent to capture him and escaped."

Aoba slammed his fist on the desk, then took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair.

"What about the police?" he asked. "Their communications system was supposed to be down."

"Riot Unit 5 has its own frequency, sir."

"Then see what the MAGI can do to shut it down," Aoba replied through gritted teeth.

"Yes, sir."

He turned to us again, as if seeing us for the first time. He unzipped the bag on his shoulder and tossed us a couple bundles of clothing.

"You two: get into your plugsuits. Now."

"No privacy?" I asked.

His only response was to roll his eyes. After a moment's consideration, I realized that it _was_ a stupid complaint.

"Sir, Colonel Jinnai's on the line," a man called from the bridge.

As I dressed, I looked at the screen in the middle of the room. It was enormous, at least twenty feet across, with a black-and-white diagram of Berlin at its center. Dozens of smaller windows were arranged around the central diagram, each a live video feed. Small colored arrows connected each window with some point the map, which presumably indicated where the action was taking place.

Aoba's conversation with Jinnai was becoming heated.

"Sir, we need to evacuate the Reichstag immediately and concentrate our troops in—what?—I _know_ people associate the place with government authority. It doesn't matter. We can't hold onto a symbolic target like that…"

I looked at the map again, trying to figure out what was going on. One image in particular caught my eye: a couple fire teams huddled around a school bus in the middle of a concrete road. It looked like they were about to be overrun. The camera panned out, and I saw that it wasn't a road at all. They were guarding a bus parked in the middle of the airport's runway, obstructing plane traffic. And _that_ meant that the MAGI's attempts to shut down air traffic electronically had failed.

"Shinji, I think the airport's getting—"

I stopped when I saw that Shinji was staring at me, his eyes saucer-sized. _Pervert, _the irrational part of my mind screamed. But no…he was staring at my bullet wound.

"That's…really bad, Asuka."

"It's nothing."

"You need to get that taken care of," he said.

"I _said_ it's nothing. I…You just want an excuse to look at me naked, dontcha?"

It was feeble, and we both knew it. Shinji smiled anyway. A subtle change was beginning to come over him. I'd seen it before, many times, and always before a battle. He was calmer when he was like this, more confident and forceful. (And, incidentally, a cocky jerk). During the war with the Angels, we had each chosen our own peculiar ways of dealing with the stress of combat. He lived his life as a neurotic little boy and only assumed his battle persona when the fighting was about to begin. I wore mine all the time. Neither approach, I reflected, was very healthy.

_Too late to cry over spilt milk, Asuka._

"No reserves!" Aoba screamed into the receiver. "It's now or never! What the fuck do you think we'll do with reserves if the main line goes down? And what kind of _idiot_ tries to micromanage a coup from a single home base? Do you have any idea how much easier it would be for the government to attack a single target like that?"

The conversation never finished. An explosion went off in the hallway behind the armored doors, followed seconds later by something that sounded like splintered glass rebounding along the metal walls. Aoba slammed the phone down and turned to a short-haired techie.

"I thought you told me that RPGs couldn't penetrate the bakelite!"

"I…I can't understand it, sir," she stammered. "I don't know what—"

"Recoilless rifles!" another voice yelled. "They're firing plastic explosives!"

"What?!"

"It sticks to the bakelite before exploding. The blast vibrates the whole thing until it shivers into pieces. It's used for antitank rounds--"

"_Thank _you, Lieutenant Rodney. I get the picture," Aoba said. "Asuka, Shinji: We don't have much time. The main line to the EVA cages is blocked off. You're going to have to crawl through the ventilation system."

"_Crawl?_" I said.

"I can carry you," Shinji offered.

I forced myself to stand straight up and clicked the button on my plugsuit.

"That won't be necessary."

* * *

The three hundred meter crawl to the EVA cages was torture, though I did my best to conceal it from Shinji. After the first twenty meters, I decided that the ducts' pine green paint was the most revolting color in existence. The irregular thumping of our hands and knees on the aluminum floor was just as maddening. My chest and shoulder muscles burned from pain and lack of blood, and they nearly gave out on a couple occasions.

I wondered momentarily what sort of idiotic architect would build four foot wide air ducts. Whoever he was, he must have worked on Tokyo-3's system as well.

"This brings back memories, doesn't it?" Shinji said. He'd probably meant it to cheer me up, but his forced, sing-song tone made me want to reach back and hit him. Even the echo of his voice gave me a headache.

"_Ich werde euch töten, wenn man sich_—"

"Sorry, Asuka. What was that?"

"Look at my ass like you did last time and I'll kill you," I said.

"Oh."

"Weren't you supposed to be his girlfriend or something?" a third voice called from behind us. "What's with you two? Bad breakup or something?"

"Shut up!" we both yelled simultaneously.

* * *

When we finally emerged into the light again, I collapsed onto the floor and gasped for breath. The hiatus lasted a grand total of twenty-two seconds (I counted). Then they picked me up and carried me to face my new EVA.

It looked the same as toothy, bulbous-headed monstrosities that had torn me to pieces during Third Impact. Exhausted as I was, I shuddered. Years ago, I had taunted Shinji with my own secret fear: that the entry plug felt like a return to the womb. Now I would be curled up in the womb of one of the machines that killed my mother.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Where are the other EVAs?"

The man I'd spoken to turned pale.

"_Other_ EVAs?"

"You don't know about the other EVAs?" I asked shrilly.

"I...no…"

Some of Shinji's pre-battle calm began to evaporate. His hands were now opening and closing in a regular rhythm.

"Sir, maybe you'd better ask Aoba where they are," a woman in an engineer's uniform suggested.

The man nodded and shakily raised the radio to his mouth.

"Lieutenant Aoba? Are you there? The Children say there are supposed to be two other EVAs."

When Aoba replied, we could hear shots being fired in the background.

"They moved 'em before the test. We don't know where they are. Get one of the Children into the EVA _immediately._"

"Yes, sir. And what if—"

"I'm busy," Aoba interrupted. "This is my last transmission."

The channel went silent.

"Get me in there," I said.

"Asuka, maybe I should try first," Shinji said. "You're not in great condition at the moment, and…"

I glared at him until he trailed off.

"You know as well as I do that the strain from EVA piloting is mostly mental," I said. "I'm going."

* * *

Shinji had always insisted that the LCL in Rei's EVA smelled like her. I hadn't participated in the compatibility experiments, and I'd always assumed that he was either lying or delusional. Probably both. The minute I entered the MP EVA, I realized that he had been telling the truth.

No pilot had imprinted on the EVA yet, but there was definitely an odor there. It was nauseatingly sweet and antiseptic, like being dunked into a tank of cheap air freshener. Every once in a while, though, I smelled an undercurrent of rotting meat.

This was _not_ my Unit 02.

"_Erst Erfullung…Anfang des Nervenanschlusses…_" I intoned. The EVA warmed up. I groped through the mental static, looking for the nimble, protective mind that I'd always found in Unit 02. Remembering my last battle, I worried that I would find an uncontrollable monster instead.

The MP EVA was neither. It had the mind of an abused, brain-damaged animal too broken to fight me as I extended my control over its body.

I became conscious of a thousand tiny pains all over, along with sharper ones along my left arm and right leg. I looked for their source and noticed that my new skin was pockmarked with metal patches and motors where skin and muscle should have been. In their haste to finish the EVA on time, the designers had substituted mechanical parts for some of the biological ones. These would be the vulnerable points that I would have to protect with my AT field.

_If you can still form one_, a voice in my head taunted.

I turned on the intercom.

"What's this battery pack on my back? And don't you _dare_ tell me that this EVA doesn't have an S-2 organ," I said.

"Don't worry," a voice on the other end said. "It's an old EVA battery we refitted to power the positron cannon."

"What happens when the battery runs out?"

"The battery draws power directly from the Evangelion."

"What?!" I yelled. "So it's going to suck the power out during combat?"

"It's limited to very small amounts at any particular time. There's a safety feature to make sure of that."

"What about hand-to-hand weapons?" I asked.

"There's a replica Lance on the surface. It isn't finished, so it can't assume its pronged form when you throw it."

"So essentially it's a really big double-bladed swordstaff?"

"Yes."

"_Wundervoll_. You get all that, Shinji?"

"Yes," he said over the intercom.

"Good. It's your job to give me advice when I'm out there. Now that Misato's gone, you're probably more experienced with EVAs than anybody else alive."

"Other than you, of course" he added. I could hear the smile in his voice.

"Naturally," I said.

"But since when does the Great Asuka Langley Sohryu need advice?"

"Don't push your luck, _Dummkopf_."

I barked the final commands and waited for the EVA to start. Everything went smoothly—I could feel the muscles waking up as they accepted my control. The movements were sluggish, but then again, I hadn't piloted for a long time. It would probably take a minute or two to recapture the dexterity I'd enjoyed as a girl.

"You can do this, Asuka," I muttered to myself.

"Synch ratio climbing," a voice called out. "Seven percent. Nine percent. Eleven percent. Fifteen percent. Sixteen…No, wait. Holding at fifteen percent."

"_What?!_"

"I'm sorry, Asuka. It's stuck at fifteen percent."

"But it'll barely be able to move!" I said.

_No! Please, no, _I pleaded. _Not again! Not now!_

I thought of the warrior girl who chopped her way through nine MP EVAs as NERV and the rest of the world crumbled around her. The girl who had finally managed to channel the years of pressure and loveless isolation into a single perfect performance. Her opponents had been invincible, but she'd still left them with enough injuries to fill an emergency ward.

Right now, I hated that girl with every fiber of my being.

I jerked the control sticks in and out uselessly. When the EVA didn't respond, I tried to impose myself by force of will. The EVA didn't have the spirit to fight back, but it didn't need to. It responded to my mental prods and kicks with resigned apathy. At last, I even begged.

The EVA remained almost immobile. I was useless again.

"Asuka, concentrate harder!" someone said.

"I can't!" I moaned. "I'm trying as hard as I can!"

I expected what was coming next. That foreknowledge didn't make it any less painful.

"Get Shinji in there."

Of course. That would make the humiliation complete, wouldn't it? Damaged goods at nineteen, four years out of a prime that had barely lasted beyond my fifteenth birthday—and now replaced by the same pathetic kid who'd…

"No. Keep her in there," Shinji said.

"This isn't the time for pity, Third!" I snapped.

"It's not pity," he said. "Neither of us has synched in four years. I don't think I'll do any better."

My desperation quickly boiled into rage.

"You're not even going to _try_? You're willing to turn yourself over to BABYKA and you're too cowardly to crawl into a fucking entry plug?"

The other end of the line was silent for a moment. Shinji hadn't realized that I'd seen him creeping into my room, let alone that I'd read the note.

"I'm not giving up, Asuka. I think I figured out another way to raise the synch ratio."

I started running through possibilities in my mind, trying to figure out what he was getting at. I searched for something—anything—that would allow me to pilot the EVA. Nothing came to mind. But what if…

_Of course!_

It wasn't what I'd hoped for. On the other hand, it was better than dying in a firefight or a BABYKA torture chamber. I took a deep breath, relaxed my shoulders, and pushed my few remaining dreams of glory aside.

"Come aboard, copilot Ikari."

* * *

A barrage of artillery shells hit me in the face as soon as I surfaced. I threw my hands up as a shield, but they moved slowly, like running in a dream. The armor held up well. On the other hand, I doubted that the improvised mechanical bits would be able to sustain a direct hit.

Shinji had been right on both counts. Using two pilots doubled our effectiveness, but his synch ratio was just as pathetic as mine. We were about to fight Winthrop's army without the benefit of an AT field and a synch score below thirty percent. Judging from the sound of chopper blades, Winthrop's air force was arriving as well.

"Let's see how well you bastards can fight without a power cord to target," I said.

I reached for the swordstaff and took a few more tank shells to the face in the process. Aside from clouding my vision, they didn't pose any danger. The tanks of the First Executive Guards were entrenched on a green, rolling hillside in front of us. Fifty smoothbore guns poked out from a fifty hastily-dug hills, each designed to obscure everything but the top of the turret. To a conventional force, it would have been impenetrable. To an EVA, it was a termite mound waiting to be kicked over.

"Shinji, just remember to back up my movements. When you feel me moving an arm or—AAAGH!"

Both of us screamed. Even with the low synch ratio, something had managed to hurt my—our—leg, badly. Unlike my mother, this EVA passed as much of its pain to the pilot as it could. I looked down and saw a smoking hole in my thigh where one of the metal patches had been.

Another shell slammed into my arm. I started moving toward the mass of enemy troops. They tried to scatter, but even in slow-motion, my EVA's stride length made it too fast to avoid. When I reached them, I started crushing tanks and IFV's with my feet. It felt like stepping on empty soda cans.

Compared to my duel before Third Impact, the battle was a farce. Even so, I felt a surge of predatory joy that I hadn't experienced in years. I grinned at Shinji. He didn't return the smile. His expression was a mixture of fear and nausea, and he seemed to be struggling to keep his concentration.

I'd never felt guilty about killing the JSDF troops in Tokyo-3, and I didn't feel guilty about repeating the performance now. Winthrop's Guard Regiment had enough blood on its hands to ease even the most sensitive conscience. Even if it hadn't, its soldiers still knew the risks when they signed up. They'd signed the same agreement I'd made with NERV when I was four years old.

I didn't feel sorry for anything…Except, in that brief moment, for making Shinji help me kill them. Unfortunately, I'm not the right person to turn to if you're looking for comfort.

"Buck up, Third. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

And the First Guard Regiment was definitely broken. Its armored vehicles and artillery were crumpled wrecks. Any footsoldiers who hadn't been crushed in their APCs were cowering in the woods. I glanced over the hill at the Second Regiment and realized that my work was probably done. After watching the fate of their brothers-in-arms, they'd decided to pull back. I considered whether I should take a swipe at them before they got away. Ultimately, I decided against it. The risks to Shinji's psyche were too high, and without his help I couldn't continue piloting.

Another bolt of pain shot through my leg. I scanned the area for the source of the attack.

"Attack helicopters at four o'clock," Shinji said.

They were too far away to hit with the swordstaff, and I was too sluggish aim properly anyway. A third missile burned into my leg in the same spot the last two had hit. My knee started to buckle. In a moment, I would be crippled.

Shinji reacted before I did. I felt him reach for the positron gun, and I supported the movement. Not for the last time, I thanked the war gods for our synchronization training five years back.

I fired. A blue neon ball the size of a minivan collided with the helicopter and blasted it to pieces. The other choppers veered away from the cloud of smoke, but by that time I'd fired again. Another direct hit. Another rain of shrapnel.

Shinji tapped me on the shoulder.

"I don't think we have many shots left, Asuka."

"We won't need them," I replied.

I turned two more helicopters into fireballs. The rest took the hint and turned away from the battle. I watched them retreat eastward, toward the rising sun. Silhouetted against the dawn, they looked for all the world like a flock of hummingbirds.

Then I saw another silhouette: a hunched, gangly giant with drooping shoulders and arms that dangled at its sides like thick ropes. My stomach knotted and the LCL in my mouth turned to ice.

"How…?" I managed to get out.

"Jinnai said something about the Dummy Plug system when he captured us."

"I thought he was bluffing!" I said.

I took stock of our situation. We were barely above minimum functional synch ratio. We had to cooperate to pilot, whereas our opponent had the benefit of a single mind. Our EVA's leg was nearly crippled. We couldn't form an AT field. Worst of all, the enemy EVA was carrying a swordstaff of its own.

Shinji's voice interrupted my thoughts.

"There's another one!"

He was right. It was distant, but another monstrous shape was moving toward us from the west. If we were going to stand any chance at all, we would have to attack the first one while it was still moving through Berlin. With luck, its brother wouldn't arrive until we'd disabled it.

Or, more likely, until after we'd been killed.

I urged my EVA into a sprint. It just stood there, frozen.

"What the…?"

Shinji glared at me with a look of determination I'd only ever seen on his viewscreen during combat. He'd never looked at me that way face-to-face.

"Asuka, we're not going to fight in Berlin."

"Are you _crazy_?!" I screamed.

"No, I'm not. There are civilians in there."

"This is war, you idiot!"

"I'm not going to make a choice that gets innocent people killed," he replied.

"What do you think is going to get more people killed, _Dummkopf_: Fighting in Berlin, or twenty more years of Winthrop?"

"At least that'll be on Winthrop's conscience rather than mine," he said.

If not for the LCL's decelerating effects, I would have belted him in the jaw.

"You know what, Shinji? I don't have time for this shit. I'm not Misato, and I'm not going to stand here and comfort you like a _fucking eight year old_. You know what's riding on this. _You're_ the one who stopped me from killing myself, remember? I'm here on _your_ dime, _Arschloch_. You wanna let me die again? Great. Be my guest. If not, _take your foot off the fucking brakes_!"

Life seeped back into the Evangelion's legs. I broke into a run as soon as I could feel my feet.

"We'll probably die anyway," he said.

I swung the swordstaff over my head and laughed.

"Today's a good day to die, Shinji."

"Maybe you're right," he said.

I swung my weapon at the Dummy Plug's EVA without breaking stride. He took the blow on the end of his own swordstaff and tried to thrust over my guard. I pivoted, dug my heels into the ground, and deflected the thrust over my head. My feet dug deep furrows into the ground as I tried to force my thirteen-hundred-ton body to decelerate.

The Dummy Plug's EVA watched me carefully, waiting for me to make the first move so it could counterattack. With his twin arriving in less than a minute, I didn't have much of a choice. I rotated my right side forward as if I was going to strike his left cheek, then lunged for the inside of his left leg.

The feint worked, but my reflexes were shot. My opponent skipped away just in time, and I barely scrambled back into position before he counterattacked. He swung for the right side of my head, but the attack was amateurish. His grip was poorly balanced. Both hands held the swordstaff at its center as if it was a baseball bat. I held my weapon vertically and swept it across my right side, catching the blow on the swordstaff's midsection. It would take him a second to recover position. He'd lost momentum, and right now his weapon was nothing more than a heavy impediment.

I lunged and opened up the right side of his face.

The EVA—or its commanding dummy plug; I could never be sure which—screamed in pain. It—or he—recovered quickly, though. Within seconds, he swept his swordstaff downward at my legs. I blocked it with the lower half of my weapon, but I wasn't able to anchor the blade into the ground. The swordstaff's tip slid beneath my guard and sliced my foot. The Dummy Plug opened his EVA's misshapen mouth and grinned at me.

I didn't have many lunges left before my foot gave out. It was now or never, especially since our second opponent would be there any minute. I feinted for the right leg and then threw myself forward, rotating my hips and body to the left. As the right side of my swordstaff approached his head, I prayed that he wouldn't block it in time.

He didn't. Instead, he calmly jumped away and stood just out of reach. He could see the other EVA a few thousand meters away, and he wasn't going to give me the chance to land a killing blow before help arrived.

"We can't catch up with him in time," Shinji groaned.

"Shut _up!_"

Living most of your life in an LCL aquarium has a lot of drawbacks. One of them is that you never learn just how far a staff weapon can reach.

I slid my hands to the base of the swordstaff and swung it in an arc at his left cheek. This time, he didn't react quickly enough. My blade sliced through the middle of his head, unleashing a geyser of blood. I wondered irrelevantly whether EVAs were pressurized.

As I'd expected, cutting off the EVA's head hadn't killed the Dummy Plug. It _had_ blinded him, though. He took two steps and crashed into a building. As he flailed around in the rubble, I carefully sliced his arms and legs off.

"Asuka, look out!" Shinji yelled.

I wheeled around a little too quickly and heard a crack in my right knee. After taking abuse from tank shells, missiles, and dozens of lunges, the joint was beginning to tear at the socket. The entire leg stiffened from waves of pain. There wasn't much time now, and I tried to restore flexibility by forcing it to bend. That was a mistake. The remaining tendons snapped, and I toppled to the ground in agony. Even then, I had the presence of mind to grab the positron rifle.

"You _idiot_!" I screamed. "Look what you made me…"

Shinji's eyes were riveted on the approaching giant. I followed his gaze to see what was going on. As soon as I did, I slammed my fist on the intercom button.

"He's got a fully operational lance!"

"Shoot him!" came the reply.

I did. At that range, it was impossible to miss. Unfortunately, it was still too far to neutralize his AT field.

As soon as the shot glanced off, the EVA broke into a run. He held the lance like an Olympic javelin thrower, with the same graceful precision I'd seen from Ayanami when she'd skewered the fifteenth Angel. I got the feeling that the Dummy Plug would share her uncanny accuracy. I could do nothing but passively wait to die.

Shinji hit the intercom button.

"Remove the safety on the positron cannon!" he shouted.

"But…"

"If I'm wrong, we're dead anyway. Remove it!"

A light went off in my head.

"Are you insane?" the voice asked.

I slammed my hand down on the second com line.

"The S-2 engine produces infinite energy, remember?" I said. "_Infinite_ energy."

The Dummy Plug's EVA was almost close enough to throw its lance.

"Disengaging now," the voice said over the intercom.

I felt the remaining strength seep out of my EVA's muscles, leaving behind a burning sensation that felt like I'd finished a marathon and couldn't breathe. My head swam and my vision began darkening. The EVA was so close now….

I fired.

My vision snapped back to normal, just in time to be blinded by the muzzle flash. Instead of an energy ball, the positron cannon fired a solid stream of light as thick as my EVA's arm. It punched through the AT field as if it wasn't there and left a giant charred hole where the core had been. The other EVA sagged in mid-stride and toppled head over heels. It rolled forward, carried by its remaining momentum until it careened into a hillside. Shinji said afterward that it was like watching a butterfly die in mid-flight.

* * *

It took another hour for the rest of Winthrop's army to surrender. We spent that hour looking ridiculous, hopping on one leg from hotspot to hotspot to convince the holdouts to give up. A few refused. Fortunately for Shinji's peace of mind, our conventional forces took care of most of them.

We arrived at our retrieval point at eight AM. It seemed absurdly early after spending the bulk of the last 24 hours screaming at each other or locked in combat.

"I'm gonna sleep for a month," I groaned.

"I'll be too jittery to sleep," Shinji replied. He sat a foot away from me hunched over his thighs, hugging his knees to his stomach. It wasn't from exhaustion. Shinji had already begun to retreat from his 'hero' persona, and his body language reflected the change.

I felt a sharp pain in my side from the bullet wound. With my synchronization gone and adrenaline depleted, I knew that it would only get worse.

I switched off the communication system.

"Shinji?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

I was relieved when he didn't ask me to clarify exactly _what_ I was thanking him for. I wasn't sure I knew myself.

"You're welcome," he said simply.

A long pause followed. A small vortex of LCL formed around Shinji's nostrils, which meant he was taking a deeper breath than usual.

"Asuka?"

"What?"

"Do you…I mean, I wondered if you felt…"

"You want to know if I love you," I finished.

"Y…yes."

I sighed. This wasn't going to be easy, but the truth seldom is. Snapping at him to shut up would only prolong the discomfort for both of us.

"No."

He huddled together even more tightly, if that was possible.

"Shinji, I was a lonely little girl when you met me. I didn't have any family worth mentioning, and the closest thing to friends I'd had in Germany were my tutors. When I met you, another EVA pilot…you were the only peer I had."

He didn't respond. In fact, he didn't move at all. He just stared blindly at the control panel.

"I realized that you were attracted to me—even with my limited people skills, it was easy to notice. You paid attention to me when I flirted with you…"

_And when I bullied you, _I thought.

"…so that's what I did to get your attention."

Shinji was totally silent. I'd expected that reaction. Since Third Impact, I'd rehearsed this speech in my mind a thousand times, always imagining that it would be thrown in his face during an argument. Life's little ironies…

Finally, Shinji spoke again.

"I see. I…won't ask again. I'm sorry, Asuka."

Now came the truly humiliating part. The part I _hadn't_ rehearsed for the last four years.

"I'm not finished," I said.

A look of confusion spread across his face.

"Shinji, you're all I've got left. There's nobody left alive who I can relate to."

The look of confusion changed to…recognition? Empathy?

"So there you have it, Shinji. You win by default."

_If you still want me_, I added silently. I stared at the floor and waited for him to throw my rejection back at me. My bluntness would make it easy for him. I'd offered him a relationship without love because I couldn't do any better. Just a little physical attraction and the ghost of old friendship. Sex, too, if he wanted it.

I doubted that it would be enough. Shinji had never been interested in sex for its own sake; it had always been a means to an end—to feel unconditionally nurtured and loved. I'd just refused to do either, and demanded that he give me both.

On the other hand, I'd underestimated Shinji's own desperation.

"It's better than nothing," he said at last.

I nodded. I suddenly remembered my rebuke to Misato during Third Impact: _You're just two depressed grown-ups licking each other's wounds._

We didn't say anything for a very long time. At last, Shinji uncharacteristically restarted the conversation.

"Asuka, I worry sometimes."

I snorted.

"_That's_ a surprise," I said.

He looked at me seriously.

"When Instrumentality took our souls apart and put us back together again…"

He paused, waiting for me to veto a discussion about Third Impact.

"Go on," I said.

"How do we know that we're still the same people?" he said. "I mean, what if our current consciousness only started to exist after we reassembled?"

"I think I'd remember something like that," I said.

"But that's just it…if we were created during Instrumentality, we would have received all of the old Shinji's and Asuka's memories. We could spend the rest of our lives arguing about things that neither of us ever did."

The image of two people fighting over poisoned memories that weren't their own frightened me. What if the fifteen year old girl I resented so deeply wasn't even me?

"But like you said, we wouldn't remember it," I replied. "There's no way of knowing for sure. It's useless thinking about things like that."

"I suppose you're right."

Outside, I could hear the recovery teams moving the hydraulic plug extractor into position.

"We'll talk about this later," I said. "I have to take care of something when I get back."

"Okay." He stretched out a little and sank back into his seat. He looked burned out, but his brow was soft and relaxed. It may not have been the closure he was looking for, but at the moment it was probably enough. At least, I hoped so.

"Wanna kiss?" I asked wearily.

"I guess so."

* * *

That evening, I was ushered into a small, darkened room somewhere in NERV Central's basement. Like most of NERV's facilities after Third Impact, it hadn't been cleaned in years. The only light came from a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling on the far side of the room. Under it sat a tired, bruised man tied to a chair. One of his cheekbones was broken. By the look of him, I guessed his ribs and legs weren't in good shape either. Little clouds formed in the freezing air from his ragged breaths.

The floor squished as I walked toward the chair. I looked down and noticed that a wet green film had formed over what had once been white tile. I felt spider webs brush across my face twice before I reached light.

This was a room where secrets were kept.

"Glad you could join us, Miss Sohryu."

I nearly jumped when I heard the voice. Theatrical as always, Jinnai had been waiting in the shadows for my arrival. He stepped into the light, holding a gun in his hand.

"Ladies' privilege," he said.

I stared at it for a moment, unsure of what to do.

"Hurry up, Sohryu. I can't afford to keep a counterrevolutionary figurehead around much longer."

I willed myself to take the gun. The man in the chair looked up at me, only mildly surprised.

"You, Asuka? I knew Shinji might be a problem, but _you?_"

"You should know why," I said.

Winthrop pretended to ponder this for a moment.

"Because I kicked you out of my bed and gave you to Jinnai?"

My hand clenched so quickly that I almost shot myself. Bile filled my throat.

"I was never interested in you," I said. "Either of you. What I did was for my own protection"

"And I only slept with you to keep you loyal," he replied. "Fat lot of good itdid me. In any event, didn't Hans Whatever-his-name-was dump you before I picked you up?"

"You gave him a promotion to stop seeing me, you son of a bitch!" I spat.

"That was probably for the best." He grinned at me through a bleeding mouth. For a moment, I was impressed and unnerved at the same time that he still had the guts to mock me with half the bones in his body broken. I shivered, and not just from the lack of heating.

"How's that?" I asked.

"Sluts like you are a liability for a career soldier."

I brought the pistol butt down on his broken cheekbone. He cried out, but not as loudly as I'd expected him to.

"Try that again," he said. "You've got nothing on Jinnai's people."

"You killed my mother!" I screamed.

For the first time, he looked confused. I smiled grimly.

"You didn't think I knew about that, did you, _Wichser_?" I said.

"No, I figured as much," he said. "It's just…That's_ it?_"

I didn't think I'd heard the last part correctly.

"Excuse me?"

"You expect me to believe you'd risk your life for a woman who died when you were four years old? Whose only contact with you in the last fifteen years was three minutes in a giant robot? You're joking, right?"

He tried to laugh, but his bruised lungs rebelled against the attempt and he ended up gasping in pain instead.

"No, Asuka…I think you were doing it for somebody else." He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "Jinnai, maybe? No, perhaps not. Some other guy you've been whoring around with recently that I don't know about?"

I ground my teeth and flicked the safety off.

"I'd tell you to ask my mother when you see her, but I don't think you'll run into her where you're going," I said.

He looked me in the eyes and smirked.

"I really doubt that," he said.

I fired until the magazine was empty and his brains were lying somewhere in the darkened half of the room. As usual, he'd gotten the last word.

"You certainly took your sweet time," Jinnai grumbled.

I thrust the gun into his hands.

"Shinji doesn't hear about any of this. _Any_ of it. Understand?"

Jinnai nodded.

"It would be counterproductive to tell him anyway," he said.

I staggered out of the room and waited for my stretcher bearers to carry me back up the stairs. The elevator hadn't worked in years.


	5. Epilogue: Shinji

**Epilogue: Shinji**

**One Month Later**

The sun ebbed in the purpling evening sky as the greatest armada since Third Impact readied itself for departure. Ships of every imaginable description jostled with one another as if the sea wasn't wide enough to hold them. To our right were the giant tankers. Despite their recent conversion to troop transports, their crews still complained that they reeked of crude oil. The _Cavour_, probably the world's only remaining aircraft carrier, sat on the edge of the horizon surrounded by a pack of destroyers. Sailors still called the ship by her older Italian name despite the Chairman's insistence on rechristening her the _Nanami_.Huddled under her decks were twenty fighter-bombers, the entirety of our fleet's air cover. After seeing the UN Pacific Fleet from its gargantuan flagship _Over the Rainbow_, the sight was underwhelming.

The trip to South America would take a few months, and I wondered what Berlin would be like when we got back. The second EVA wouldn't be repaired for a while, but the S-2 engine was intact, and the tech team had already figured out how to tap into its limitless energy. I'm no engineer, but even I recognized the value of that energy in rebuilding the framework of industrial civilization.

Asuka had spent the day screaming herself hoarse at the crane operators as they lowered "her" EVA into a cargo ship. I felt sorry for any South American warlords stupid enough to resist when we arrived.

And no, that wasn't a joke.

"Well, she's as cheerful as ever," a voice behind me said.

"Aoba! Where have you been?"

He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled slightly. The former bridge crewman wore a uniform so gaudy that for a moment I thought it was intended as a joke. The mass of epaulettes, triple-breasted buttons, and braided gold made him look like he'd stepped out of the Napoleonic wars.

"Better question: What's with the suit?" Asuka sniffed.

"Jinnai's idea of a little joke," he said.

"I don't get it."

"He kicked me upstairs," Aoba said. "Supervisor-General-in-Chief of the Engineering Corps. Jinnai wanted me as far away from politics—and you two, incidentally—as possible, so he invented some no-name post with a fancy title and a fat salary to keep me happy. Serves me right for training my replacement to work the MAGI."

"Sucks for you," Asuka observed.

Aoba chuckled. If he was bitter or embarrassed, he didn't show it.

"A stupid uniform is a small price to pay for comfortable anonymity," he said.

I nodded and wondered what it would take to get the same thing.

"Besides," he continued, "I got out at the right time. Sometimes I think Jinnai's a little crazier than Winthrop. You know what he was going to do if the EVA failed? He wanted to use the MAGI control over the N-2 mines to destroy Berlin block by block until the army gave in."

We both stared at him, open-mouthed. That was one conversation we hadn't been privy to.

"All in all, I'm glad he let me out with as much as he did," he added.

"I guess it's good to know where you stand in the grand scheme of things," Asuka said. "Shinji could learn a couple things from you."

"Oh?" Aoba said, his voice dripping with feigned interest.

Asuka took a deep breath and launched into a tirade that she must have been planning for me later on.

"This _idiot_ sends money to enemies of the state. Just the other day, he stopped a girl on the street corner _as she was getting dragged off by the secret police_ to ask her where her family lives so he could give them money for food. The kid has the political savvy of a brick wall—"

"Her kids would have _starved_ Asuka," I said.

"Who cares? And don't interrupt--"

"And she wasn't an enemy of the state anyway. The woman was a greengrocer!"

"With possible ties to the _Chiang-Shih_. And I told you already, don't interrupt—"

"She wasn't even Chinese!"

"So she was innocent!" Asuka snapped. "So what? The woman's a liability!" She stood with her legs apart and waved her arms over her head in a way that told me that I would never win this argument. Aoba leaned against a nearby tent post and rolled his eyes, a picture of amused indifference.

_And why not?_ I thought. _We're not his problem anymore_.

We did our best to engage in a couple minutes of conversation—which, as usual, consisted of Asuka throwing barbs while I stared sheepishly at the ground and tried to answer questions in monosyllables. Charming couple though we undoubtedly were, Aoba found some polite reason or other to break away. We were on our own again, and it was getting dark.

"Would you like to watch the sunset?" I asked.

"Why?"

"It's kinda nice to watch. If you want to."

Asuka shrugged and walked over to a spot a few hundred meters away where the view wasn't clogged by a wall of rusty ships. She sank to her knees, and I sat down beside her. I sighed as I watched the clouds darken and the sun slowly sink under the water.

"What?" she demanded.

"Eh?"

"What's the sigh for?"

"Just the sunset," I said.

"Oh."

I stretched my foot out to the water and dipped it in the ocean. It was something I'd been afraid to do since Third Impact. Traces of LCL from a billion liquefied corpses still floated there. Besides, I'd never liked the ocean.

Tentatively, I rested a hand on her nearer shoulder. She didn't reciprocate. For that matter, she didn't do anything to acknowledge the movement.

"For somebody who threatened to stop piloting if she couldn't go with me, you're not very affectionate today," I said. I'd meant it as a gentle conversation-starter. As usual, I managed to pick exactly the wrong thing to say. I felt her shoulders tense, and she shrugged and shied away. I withdrew my hand.

"In a few months, they'll have new Dummy Plugs and I won't be able to make that threat anymore. Besides, that kind of affection is _your_ part of the bargain, Third. Not mine."

"Asuka…"

"Are you tired of our arrangement already?"

"No, but—"

"Then stop," she said. She had visibly relaxed after the 'no', and her request sounded more sad than suspicious.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She gave a disgusted little snort and stood up, her arms wrapped around her torso.

"It's getting cold. If you need to use me for sex, I'll be in the tent."

As she walked back across the beach, I wondered whether she'd intended that businesslike statement to be rebuke or an ironic peace offering. She would never clarify the matter for me; that much was certain. For the thousandth time, I wondered something that neither of us dared speak aloud: _Just how long can this last?_ The rolling waves didn't bring an answer, but they did bring sleep.

And with sleep came dreams.

I was fifteen years old again, staring out at the endless expanse of the Sea of LCL. The great red ring of souls dominated the skyline, twice as thick as it was in my own time. In the distance, the mutilated head of Rei Ayanami stared at me from its single remaining eye. Even dead, it seemed alert and watchful

Rei hovered above the churning red sea, still a fourteen-year-old in a school uniform that seemed woefully inappropriate for the most powerful being on Earth. Her sudden appearance should have startled me, but it didn't.

"Hello, Rei."

"Hello, Ikari," she replied.

I sat down on the shore and she floated over to me. I stared at my reflection.

"Rei, why am I like this?" I asked.

She cocked her head to one side.

"I do not understand," she said.

"My age. I'm not fifteen anymore."

"You were…uncomfortable before when you talked to me," she said. "Was this due to your age?"

I nodded.

"And you are more comfortable now?" she asked.

"Yes."

She smiled and fixed me again with her eerie, beautiful thousand-yard stare.

"Then I am glad."

"You did this to make me feel comfortable?" I asked.

She looked puzzled again, and shook her head.

"I had nothing to do with it. Your body is Shinji Ikari as he sees himself; the Shinji Ikari that exists in your mind that represents the self."

"So my sense of selfhood is stuck as a teenage boy during the worst time of my life?"

She continued staring at me, but didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I wondered if her years among humanity's memories had given her a better understanding of rhetorical questions. Then again, perhaps her refusal to state the obvious was just an extension of her unnatural economy of motion.

"Is this the life you wished for, Ikari?" she asked.

"I think…"

I paused, throwing aside the easy, conversational answer to give the question the thought it deserved.

"No, but it's the life I have," I said. "I'm keeping it."

Something dripped into the LCL. Its ripples, much larger than they should have been, distorted my reflection. I looked up and saw that Rei was crying.

"If…if things do not last…I will always be waiting, Ikari."

For the second time today, I was at a loss for what to say. Again, I chose the worst possible response.

"It'll be kinda awkward if I'm an old man by then," I said. I hoped the feeble joke would make her smile, as she had after the Fifth Angel. Instead, she glared back at me through her tears with a ferocity that I'd rarely seen from anyone, let alone Ayanami.

"I will _always_ be waiting! The physical body does not matter in Instrumentality. I can see the light of the soul."

"I'd be absorbed into the universal mind, Rei."

"I would not let that happen," she said. "I have set aside a special place, as…as Yui did, with her Evangelion."

The young Angel stared at me pleadingly. I wondered at the cosmic irony of a godlike being trapped so firmly by memories of a neglected childhood that she'd latched onto the first person to show her affection.

Maybe I'm being too hard on both of us. I'm not an Angel, after all. I don't see into others people's souls. Maybe Rei genuinely saw something else in me during Instrumentality. Maybe.

But I doubt it.

"I'm sorry, Rei. Not today," I said. Her head sagged to her chest. A few teardrops moistened the front of her uniform. I touched her shoulder and she didn't shy away. Slowly, she raised her arm and stroked my hand with her own.

"I have infinite patience, Ikari. I _will_ wait."

The vision faded and I found myself back on the other beach. Reality again. I checked my watch. I hadn't checked the time before I'd nodded off, but I was sure that it couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes, even though my muscles felt like they'd been asleep for hours. I forced my stiff legs to carry me back to the tent. I unzipped the flap, stepped inside, and flattened myself across the floor with a sigh.

"You picked up the stuff I asked for, right?" Asuka asked.

"For the trip?"

"What else, _Dummkopf_?"

"They're in the backpack," I said.

"So give them to me."

I resisted the urge to groan as I peeled my body off the floor and staggered to the bag on the tabletop. I emptied the contents onto the table and handed them to Asuka, one by one, for inspection.

"New math book?"

"Here," I said.

"You know, my college degree was in math," she said. In fact, I _did_ know. She'd told me several times.

"That's impressive," I said.

"More impressive than your pretending to be surprised," she said. "New computer game?"

"One of the vendors near our apartment scrounged a copy of Demon Death IV," I said.

"Already beat it."

"How about Star Battles 3D?"

"Beat it."

"Questers 2?"

"Beat…You mean you got _all _of these?" she asked.

"Yeah. There are two more in there that you might not have played yet. I didn't know what you wanted. I'm sorry I didn't find—"

"This must've cost you a _fortune_," she said.

I rubbed the back of my head. It's a nervous gesture I haven't managed to break despite the fact that she constantly complains about it.

"I guess so, but what else would I spend it on?" I said.

Her voice softened a bit, and a wisp of a smile appeared on her lips.

"You idiot."

She walked over and picked through the remaining luggage.

"You're right. I haven't played either of these," she said. "Tell you what: let's turn the game system on and I'll beat your ass a couple times before we go to sleep."

"The game system's already on board," I said.

"Scheiße, you're right."

Asuka continued digging. She picked an old, weathered book out, looked at it, and quirked an eyebrow at me.

"_The Time Machine_? Seriously?"

"What? It was a neat book," I said.

"Yeah, in 1895."

"Sometimes I wish I could go back and change things," I said carefully.

"What, you mean like changing history by using what we know now?"

I nodded.

"Clever, Third. You bought it just to spark this conversation, didn't you?"

Again, I nodded.

"You know I don't like these 'what if' discussions." There was a note of warning in her voice.

"You're much better at them than I am," I said, hoping that the flattery would get me somewhere.

She leaned forward onto the table and rested her head on her hands.

"Fine, I'll play. If we traveled back to do it all over again, your dad would've figured it out in a few days. Tops. Then he would have confined you, killed me, and used the Dummy Plugs instead."

It wasn't the answer I'd expected, but I had to admit that it was more realistic than most of the wish-fulfillment fantasies I'd indulged in over the years.

"You know, sometimes I wonder if he figured out a way to survive his trial," I said. "That man had more lives than a cat."

"Who? You mean Gendo?" She seemed surprised.

"Yeah."

"You didn't see the rest of the tape?"

There it was again: that sickening, knotted feeling in my stomach that always came before something that I didn't want to hear.

"No," I said.

"Oh…neither did I. I thought you probably would have by now."

It was an obvious lie, and we both knew it. At that moment, though, I didn't want to pursue the question any further.

"If you're finished looking through this stuff, I can repack it," I said. I looked over and saw that she was already curled into her sleeping bag. On the off-chance that she was asleep rather than simply ignoring me, I repacked everything as quietly as possible.

"Shinji, did you bring your cello?" she asked suddenly.

"Huh? Yeah, I think it's in the trunk by the door," I said.

"Could you get it out play it for me?"

"Um…sure. Is there anything in particular that you'd like me to play?"

"Bach's Cello Suite No.1."

I took out my cello and played until she fell asleep.

**Author Notes:**

Well, that's it for the moment. I had a lot of fun writing this, and hopefully you've enjoyed reading it.

It _would_ be nice to return to the weird little universe of Evangelion sometime soon. If I get enough requests and interest, I'd be glad to write a sequel.

Until that time, I look forward to your reviews. Thanks for reading!


End file.
